vat: Change History


v4.0a5 Wed Feb 7 14:39:06 PST 1996


v4.0a4 Tue Feb 6 14:41:34 PST 1996


v4.0a3 Tue Feb 6 02:48:49 PST 1996


v1.32beta Thu Jul 23 10:45:58 PDT 1992

Vat now supports multiple vat windows, each participating in a different conference. You control which vat window gets access to the audio hardware (speaker & mike) by clicking on the title bar. (The other windows will continue to highlight sites to show that data is arriving, they just won't be able to make any noise.)

There is some support for dynamically establishing `side conversations' with other participants in a conference: If you middle click on some participant's name in the site box, you'll get a new vat window that unicasts to only that participant. If they do the same on your site name, you can have a private conversation in the new windows.

To help sort out the multiple windows, there's now a -C flag that sets the 'conference name' (the name displayed in the window title bar). If you don't specify -C, the destination address and port is used.

The way you specify the destination for -m (address/port/format/ttl) can also be used for the main conference destination. E.g., "vat foo/3456" rather than "vat -p 3456 foo". The -p, -f and -t flags still work if you want to use the old form.

A major bug in `mixing' (the -m flag) was fixed: A site mixing for some other wasn't able to hear the audio generated by that site (anyone else could -- only the site doing the mixing was excluded). A mixing site can now hear and talk to every one, including the site it's mixing for.

In the rush to get a version of vat that could display more site names for IETF, we broke the auxillary controls window. Many people have noted that it wouldn't appear unless you resized the vat window. We've fixed that. The fix required making the aux controls window a completely separate window, rather than having it part of the main vat window. This is good & bad: The vat window no longer changes size when you open or close the aux controls but you now have to move & iconify the two windows separately if the aux controls window is open. Unfortuanately, the current scheme seems to be the best we can do with the 2.6 version of InterViews we're using.

The mike and speaker AGC both seem to be working fairly well now. They both still default to "off" since we'd like to get a bit more experience with using them in large conferences but they will probably default to "on" in the next version of vat. We encourage you to turn them on and let us know if there are any problems.

You can now type 'p' in the vat window to get the current mike and speaker gain settings printed to standard out. They are printed in a form suitable for inclusion in your .Xdefaults file. I.e., once you get the speaker & mike set to your taste, just type "p" and paste the result into .Xdefaults so you won't have to ever set them again.

Henning Schulzrinne has been testing a new version of Nevot that turned out to be a vat killer: Six different people reported vat core dumps yesterday, all due to a bug triggered by Nevot continuously sending a site id message immediately followed by a site done message. This bug has been fixed.