Gallery View

A great feature in many video conferencing systems is the capability to view multiple active speaker video streams at once. Some people have referred to this as the “Brady Bunch” view or “Hollywood Squares.” Many video conferencing systems provide the capability to view multiple squares of live video from participants. If you think back to the two classic TV shows just mentioned, this reference should be clear.

Before Lync 2013, this was a major feature that Microsoft lacked. With the introduction of H.264 SVC, Microsoft has now enabled this functionality in Lync Server 2013. The new video codec allows the Lync Server 2013 A/V Conferencing Server to provide multiple video streams with very little processing power. If you remember from the earlier sections, H.264 SVC has intelligence that allows for the MCU to act as a simple video switch, while leveraging the endpoints to facilitate which level of video quality it is capable of sending and receiving. Some traditional video conferencing systems leverage very powerful MCUs to actively build the multiple video-stream view and deliver that view to endpoints as a single video stream. This approach requires much more processing power in the central MCU, and this would not work well in a Lync Server environment.

This functionality definitely brings video conferencing in Lync Server 2013 to a whole new level. As you can see in Figure 19.2, Microsoft has implemented this functionality in an extremely elegant way, always focusing on end user experience.

Figure 19.2. Lync 2013 Gallery View.