Microsoft Portrait 2.2 Released

[Robert Levy]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://research.microsoft.com/~jiangli/portrait/' target='_blank'>http://research.microsoft.com/~jiangli/portrait/</a><br /><br /></div>For those who like to play with cutting-edge prototype software, version 2.2 of Microsoft Portrait was recently released as a free download from Microsoft Research.<br /><br /><i>"Microsoft Portrait is a research prototype for mobile video communication. It supports .NET Messenger Service, Session Initiation Protocol and Internet Locator Service on PCs, Pocket PCs, Handheld PCs and Smartphone. It runs on local area networks, dialup networks and even wireless networks with bandwidths as low as 9.6 kilobits/second. Microsoft Portrait delivers portrait-like video if users are in low bandwidths and displays full-color video if users are in broadband. In low bandwidths, portrait video possesses clearer shape, smoother motion, shorter latency and much cheaper computational cost than do conventional video technologies. Microsoft Portrait pursues providing presence notification, chat/voice/video functions anytime, anywhere, on any device."</i><br /><br />In this new release comes support for the latest version of the .NET Messenger Service, Microsoft Live Communications Server 2003, and (this is the part that sounds most interesting to me) support for multi-party chat.

[TomB]

Robert and Foo, thanks for the info. Now, can you digest this a bit for newbies? This sounds like a major advance for wireless users but how does this compare with the other video codecs that are being used for wireless? Is this a flavor of MPEG4 like the rest or something new? Does it compress spacial and temporal video and is the audio codec new too? What actually makes this better / different then what we have now? Is it simply better error correction or a from the ground-up package? If this is a major step forward, when will content providers have compression tools and players to work with?

[pdazealot]

I am a huge fan of MS Portrait on the desktop, but this Smartphone version has locked up my spv and mpx200 quite a few times. I think it needs a bit more testing before it is ready for prime time. Also, it doesn't see the built in camera on my e200, nor the plugin camera for my mpx200. A shame,as the 2 way conf is really what we are looking for. Maybe in 2.3 it will be more stable, and have camera API's. MS should really work on this, as a real video phone via Portrait would be a truly killer app, especially with EDGE upgrades on ATT and arriving on Tmo. With EDGE, there will finally be enough bandwidth to make it feasible. At 35k on gprs, it just plain sucks.

[Robert Levy]

Honestly, I don't know much about how this actually works. For the tech details, you can get a lot of info from the Microsoft Research page. Specifically, check out these links:

http://research.microsoft.com/~jiangli/portrait/tech.aspx
http://research.microsoft.com/~jiangli/portrait/qna.aspx