Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Michael R VanBuskirk

Arul A Menezes

Sharad Mathur

Philippe Ferriere

Kevin Thomas Gallo

Anton W Krantz

George Joy

Tim M Moore

Mu Han

Danny Levin

John R Selbie

Wei Zhong

Guo-Wei Shieh

Dalibor Kukoleca

Zong Zong Yuan

Systems, methods, and/or techniques ('tools') are described that sort speakers in a network-enabled conference. In some cases, this sorted list of speakers indicates which speaker is dominant. With this sorted list, a participant's communication device may provide context about the speakers. In some cases a participant's communication device has a display that presents real-time video of the speakers or other visual indicia, such as each or the most dominant speaker's name, picture, title, or location. These and other context about speakers may help participants better understand discussions in network-enabled conferences.

Sorting speakers in a network-enabled conference

A system to provide a multipoint processing terminal and a multicast bridging terminal to provide mixing, switching, and other processing of media streams under the control of H.323 components. Application Programming Interfaces defined for the multipoint processing terminal provide a multipoint control unit with the capability to change the default behavior of the multipoint processing terminal by allowing the multipoint control unit to control the routing audio and video streams in the multipoint processing terminal and control the media formats in a multipoint conference. Multipoint processing acceleration functionality is provided by providing interfaces to allow hardware accelerated implementations of multipoint processing terminals. The multicast bridging terminals enables clients using one type of control signaling and media streaming to join other conferences using different types of control signaling and media streaming by receiving audio or video data from an incoming media stream and performing any processing necessary to transform the media stream from the incoming stream data format to the outgoing stream data format.

Multipoint processing unit

Dynamic sizing of packets of data is disclosed. In one embodiment, a system includes a client and a server. The client receives packets of dynamic size, the client having a bandwidth. The server determines the dynamic size of the packets based on at least one factor. One such factor is the bandwidth of the client. The server sends the packets to the client.

Dynamic sizing of data packets

A method and system for processing messages is provided. In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, a message scheduler, a job process, and a format resolution module are used. The message scheduler identifies when a new message is to be processed, schedules the new message for processing, invokes the format resolution module to determine a method of converting data in the message to an appropriate format for a destination device or file, and invokes a job process. The format resolution module determines an appropriate method for converting data in the message from a format acceptable to the source devices or files to a format acceptable to the destination devices or files and creates a target message containing a reference to a destination device or file. The job process sends the data between the source devices or files to a destination device or file and performs the appropriate conversion. The preferred embodiment of the present invention is designed to allow for the support of new devices and new data formats with little change to the existing system through the use of a building block methodology. Therefore, new devices and data formats can be supported in an easy and efficient manner.

System for transferring messages between input and output devices in a

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Michael R VanBuskirk