Tonight we had a great experiment with ustream. We did a conference with three persons. Betsy Weber from TechSmith (Camtasia Studio) in the US and Pierre Gorissen and I.
After some difficulties (ustream has no documentation) how to set up a conference, we managed to get together in one conference room in ustream. With a chatbox, video and audio.
Besty and Pierre also saw some other guy coming in (a still image?). Strange, because you just can join a conference by invitation and you must be on the friendslist. And the strange thing was. I did not see the guy.
We had some chit-chat and geeky talk and experiments. Betsy showed her desktop and move my videoscreen around 
. You can see the conference in this short screencast. Just a rough cut. Now audio from us, because that was used by the conference (I think). But with music. Watch us geeking.
Download Windows Media Video (wmv, 2.33 mb 1 min 29 sec)
Download iPod video (wmv, 2.04 mb 1 min 29 sec)
The video looked better (smoother) during the conference than in this capture. Just to explain what you see in the clip: Betsy switches from sending her webcam video to sending a live capture of her desktop. A different way of desktop “sharing”. 🙂
Great experiment Hans, Fred also wrote about it. A question about the screencast, is it possible to capture the audio as well? Although I like the music you’ve used a lot, It would be nice to view a complete conversation.
So, what do you mean by the sentence “No audio from us, because that was used by the conference (I think)”?
@pierre: as said, it is just a rough cut and I did not figure out if it could be better.
@marc: I did not prepare this. It was just a kick and run test. And I think that when the videoconferencing is using the audiodevices Camtasia cannot use it anymore. But I am not sure. I could not check the audio option in Camtasia when I wanted to start. Pierre do you know?
Oh and the conversation was not that in depth 😉 Just some chit-chat.
This test was a different one which Fred was writing about. We did it yesterdayevening.
Sorry about the documentation–I have the guys working on it! Glad you guys were able to make things work regardless.
–Chris Yeh (Ustream investor)
Hi Chris, thanks for your reply. Good to hear documentation is coming. Another thing for improving should be the audio part. The audio is sometimes very poor, choppy and sometimes even gone.
Besides this it seems that ustream does not take the audio from my Sony DV cam as webcam with firewire. With the normal headphone-mike in cable it works.
But interesting service it is!
@Marc pierre tested it a bit and saw that when you first start Camtasia and then ustream there is audio. Although he did not test in the conference. But it makes sense. I first started ustream and afterwards Camtasia.