The biggest change is it appears someone is writing a new CU-SeeMe client for Linux called Q-SeeMe. I haven't tried out the software, but it looks interesting. Try it out and if you're lucky, you don't need the rest of this page.
Please don't send me email saying "I can't make it work". I'm sorry, but I just don't have time to answer that much email. A lot of people are having trouble with this: the software is all a big hack, and things are hard to debug. You need to be patient. I promise I have it working, but a lot of folks haven't been so lucky. If it doesn't work download the sources and patches, and compile and debug yourself.
A lot of people have complained that the binary is corrupted when they download it. I have checked, the binary is right: be sure you download it in a way that your browser won't corrupt it (shift-click on Netscape seems to work most of the time).
The general setup you need is:
In addition to normal NV, you need a version that's been patched to fix an endianness problem with CU-SeeMe. You'll also want patches that enable quickcam support into NV. You have two routes: try a binary, or build from sources yourself.
This binary is all you really need to do network video. Note, it has to run as root (it opens the parallel port directly). The only problem is that NV can't connect directly to Mac/PC CU-SeeMe software. Fortunately, the reflector software can help mediate between NV and CU-SeeMe: if you're both connected to the same reflector, you can see each other. Start up NV, switch to CU-SeeMe encoding, and connect to port 4444 on a reflector that has NV support enabled (port 4444 is the default). The White Pine's test reflector at 192.80.72.4 is supposed to support NV, but I haven't been able to connect to it. I have been able to connect to vdorm.taponline.com.
One nonobvious NV thing (if you don't read man pages) - in the main window, you can click on the pictures of people to put them in their own window. In addition, you can click in those windows to display a form with some performance data.
The main bug I run into now is that sometimes libqcam doesn't correctly detect the presence of the camera. It seems that if I run xfqcam (another Linux QuickCam hack) first, telling it explicitly which port the camera is on, then quit and run NV, it finds it.
Sometimes the image quality that comes out of the QuickCam at first is ugly. For some reason, selecting "6-bit" again in the grabber control panel fixes it.
I've been told that if there are not enough colormap entries running, then NV might coredump. Netscape is a big colormap hog - kill it, or look into the -install or -ncols # options.
NV doesn't seem to support anything other than video. In particular, I get no audio, chat messages, or lists of lurkers connected to the reflector.
NV has multicast support, I don't know anything about how it works and haven't tried it.
There's been a report that NV doesn't work so well over PPP links. I'm having no trouble connecting from my home box, over 28.8kbps PPP to a reflector run on the LAN on the other end of my PPP link. I have had trouble connecting farther away than that, though, and have seen several NV clients try to connect to my reflector and time out.
You can also run your own reflector with very little effort. reflect-4.0b3 (binary distribution only) works fine under both SunOS and Linux. Start up the reflector, and tell everyone to talk to it. My standard connection right now is a reflector on a Sun hooked to a LAN so CU-SeeMe people can connect, and NV on my home Linux box, hooked via 28.8kbps PPP to the reflector. A bit convoluted, but it works.
There seem to be endianness problems with the free reflector. There's a commercial reflector also put out by White Pine which works better, you can try to connect to such a reflector at vdorm.taponline.com.
Note that reflect, by default, does not have NV support enabled. After you download the reflect binary, add the line NV-UC-PORT: 4444 to reflect.conf. I found it helpful to look at reflect.log and use the refmon program to see when my NV client was connected. Here's an output of who from refmon when one NV and one CU-SeeMe client are connected:
> who CLIENT: foo@134.10.2.24 CRV NV UNICAST: root@nelson.santafe@192.12.12.195 Total # of clients 1 senders 1 lurkers 0