Integrate rich client communication with Microsoft's real-time communication API

Summary

Learn how to create or integrate the basics of real Time communication (RTC) application programming interfaces (APIs) to achieve audio and video conferencing, application sharing, Whiteboard, simple point-to-point chat, and audio and video tuning wizards. The RTC API delivers superior pc-based communication innovations that can be applied to all Microsoft Windows XP based applications.

Introduction

Microsoft's Real Time Communications (RTC) Application Programming Interface (API) delivers excellent pc-based communication innovations-Instant messaging, audio and video conferencing, and application sharing/collaboration, which can be applied to all Microsoft Windows XP applications.

Using the RTC API to communicate is a very simple process.

Enhanced client applications determine the capabilities of the client communication platform.

The application uses the preferred video and audio device during communication.

The application initiates a communication session.

Coordinating data capture, compression, and transmission at the RTC layer makes the application not responsible for this task. The codec used for the audio and video is determined by the quality of the connection between the two communications.

The application participating in the session accepts, extracts, and replays the transmitted data.

Figure I, audio and video Conferencing example interface

This article describes how to add pc-to-pc RTC basic capabilities to an application, and we assume that you are already familiar with using COM objects to develop Windows applications. The source code discussed in this article is available in the connection given at the beginning of this article. We'll discuss pc-to-phone, presence, and XML configuration later.

The example code shows the basic elements of using the real-time communication API to implement audio and video conferencing, application sharing, Whiteboard, simple point-to-point chat and audio and video tuning wizards. Other RTC Support but this article does not discuss features such as Echo cancellation (AEC), forward error checking (FEC), bandwidth estimation, dynamic jitter buffer management, Automatic gain control (AGC) and quality of service (QC) control algorithms. The above features are described in the media support for Microsoft Windows Real-Time Communications (RTC) client.

RTC Client Interface

Required header file:rtccore.h

Your application needs to obtain the RTC interface via CoCreateInstance (), clsid_rtcclient (GUID = {7a42ea29-a2b7-40c4-b091-f6f024aa89be}) as an argument. Once the interface is obtained, the COM object is initialized with initialize () to determine the communication capabilities of the platform.

// Initialize the RTC COM object
　 hr = CoCreateInstance (CLSID_RTCClient, NULL,
　　　CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER, IID_IRTCClient,
　　　(LPVOID *)&m_pClient);
　　　// Initialize the client interface
hr = m_pClient->Initialize();