Can videotelephony exists on classic telephone lines? I mean analogical videotelephony (that works with analogic videocameras and analogic monitors), but also digital videotelephony (that are using digital videocameras and digital monitors). I see that there where some experiments with videotelephony.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotelephony
Some 10-12 yrs ago I thought that in Romania in about 2015? will have videotelephony :drunk:

Can videotelephony exists on classic telephone lines? I mean analogical videotelephony (that works with analogic videocameras and analogic monitors), but also digital videotelephony (that are using digital videocameras and digital monitors). I see that there where some experiments with videotelephony.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotelephony
Some 10-12 yrs ago I thought that in Romania in about 2015? will have videotelephony :drunk:

Analog video phones cannot be done on classic twisted copper lines - the 1960s Bell Picturephone needed 1.5 MHz bandwidth. However, relatively low quality and/or low frame rate digital is possible over voice band modems. Of course, if you are close enough to the central office to have DSL, then web-cam type video is possible.

What would it look like if you tried WEB CAM operation over a reg analog landline,has anyone ever tried?? (A 15k line MIGHT BE ABLE TO HANDLE IT CLEARLY)

I seem to remember the Home Shopping Network having some kind of video phone for sale back in the mid 80s, maybe late 80s......

Sure there were old video phones for standard phone lines. Visitel comes to mind. There are a few videos on youtube of them.

Back 10+ years ago I had a dial-up server at my house. I could dial in with my laptop and connect to my security system and see all 9 cameras over the modem. Granted, this was with low-res and mpeg compression (not very efficient), but I got about 2 frames per second on each of the 9 channels simultaneously.

I also had another setup when I was a system admin, I had a remote user set up with a 56k dial up router (my ol' standby, the Netgear RM356), an IP Phone, and her Linux order entry terminal. That way she could be on line and on the phone with only one phone line. Plus being an IP phone, her calls could be tracked and recorded by the main system at the office.

I used to do quite a bit with regular ol' phone lines back in the day.

Visitel units were astoundingly awful. They actually didn't send images real-time or even in bursts. You basically looked pretty for the camera, pressed SEND and during a three second pause you transmitted a single low resolution frame to the other unit. As for most analog though, this would be it. CRT display and a tube pickup. I've seen them on ebay for between $25-$75 each.

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/IMG_5310.jpg

The better solution is videophones that used the H.324 protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.324) which was surpisingly well used in the 90's. Often when you bought a webcam from Intel or Logitech it came with a program like VDO Phone that supported h.324 connections if you had good enough hardware. There were also a lot of "set-top" boxes which had a cruddy camera and connections to a TV and a phone line. I got like, two or three such devices from companies like Vialta and TeleVyou.

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/100_1123.jpg

Personally the best videophones ever made were AT&T's 2500 Videophones.

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer%20related/100_2167.jpg

They actually look like a proper telephone and have additional things you would expect from a half-decent phone like speed dial, hold and a speakerphone. Their two major shortfalls however are that 90's color LCD technology was TERRIBLE and these screens hold absolutely no exception and at $800-$1000 per phone they could try selling them at Sears all they want but they were just too bloody expensive for most people. Most of the phones I've found so far came out of office and school environments. They do occasionally show up on ebay but quite often either their AC adapter is missing (it's a beast 8-pin external brick, so you can't just find one in the junk drawer) or the seller still thinks it's worth at least $100+ because it's a videophone.

I've looked under the hood of one of those newer Broadband/VoIP units and they're terrible machines. Often it's some nasty Windows Mobile embedded solution that requires a subscription service, on top of the $200+ pricetag.

Just like how Video Killed the Radio Star, Skype killed the Videophone.

Best Buy sold dedicated video phone units using standard POTS lines about ten+ years ago. You can configure a pair of modems to pick-up and negotiate a connection on an existing phone call, so you could in theory "hop on" to a voice call with video. 14.4 or 28.8 could probably do a passable job of transporting low-frame-rate video, when paired with today's video compression.

The AT&T Vistium systems were sorta close... They used dedicated ISDN lines, which required two standard copper pairs (and two phone numbers) that had constraints as to distance from central office, and what other cards were in the central office card frame next to them. The subscriber end was hosted in a PC (just for power, configuration, and monitor if you weren't using composite video) but there were standard ISDN phones that would interface with them as well. Don't recall if the one pictured above was part of that set.

I used to run 4 systems (plus a back-up) as "video+audio extension cords" across the state, to ingest and aid in output for closed captioning services. The nice part was they were cheap, standards-based, and weren't subject to dropped frames because you bought your own fixed bandwidth with ISDN. Completely predictable latency made things easy to work with, too. I only ever made about three video phone calls with them, though. Both parties already knew what each other looked like, so why bother?

If you need any Vistium systems, or 14.4 modems, I can set you up!

Chip