Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire-based Lyon Lamb Multimedia Ltd has announced a full motion video and audio video-conferencing system, which runs at 25 frames per second (PAL TV rate) at full screen on desktop personal computers, without using compression technology. In what the company claims is a major breakthrough, this will be transmitted across shielded twisted pair locally using only two wires – and employ a 2Mbps video coder-decoder externally over ISDN, satellite and fibre optic cables. At the heart of the system are two developments: a mixed media balanced-to-unbalanced – balun – connector for which the company has filed a patent application, and a windowing board. Incoming signals from video cassette recorders, dishes, satellite receiver units or cameras are sent across co-ax to a rack, from where they are distributed across shielded twisted pair (via baluns at each end of the wire) to the Lyon-developed and manufactured windowing board in the user’s personal computer. The windowing board, which has its own processing capability, then takes the analogue input and displays it on the screen independently of the computer. In this way, says the company, the system not only does not require high bandwidth networks, but also does not need to share bandwidth on already saturated data networks either – bearing in mind, however, that new shielded twisted pair cabling may have to be installed. Channel selection is via an external keypad, wired back to the rack via shielded twisted pair. We’ve solved the bandwidth problem, but by using shielded twisted pair we’ve found a way for managers to deliver high-quality video and audio without their data networks being hi-jacked, said a company spokesman. According to Lyon, incoming signals from one transponder can be distributed to up to 128 users over shielded twisted pair, and each will have channel selection of up to 99 channels, bandwidth in the trans ponder permitting. The system is available now. Prices start at UKP1,000 per user, depending on configura-tion and application.
