The Polycom RealPresence Group Series are the latest family of Room Telepresence systems suited for high-quality video collaboration in meeting room and board room environments. With support for 1080p60 coupled with all new EagleEye-IV camera with up to 12x optical zoom and a 4K CMOS sensor, the Group Series family brings video to a new level of realism especially in meeting rooms equipped with large displays. Up until recently, the Group Series along with its predecessor the HDX family, only supported Microsoft RTV video codec that allowed for up to only 720p30 video. With the latest 4.1.3 firmware for Group Series released on 24 Feb, there is now support for Microsoft's native SVC implementation known as X-H264UC. What this means is that not only peer-2-peer calls between Lync 2013 clients and Group Series endpoints can reach up to 1080p30 HD resolution, the Group Series now can receive up to 5 simultaneous video streams from the Lync AVMCU, providing a conferencing experience similar to Lync's own Gallery View where up to 5 active speakers can be seen simultaneously. Unlike the Lync client, the 5 video streams are not displayed in a horizontal row on the Group Series' display. Rather, the 5 streams layout makes full use of the display's real estate to maximize the video window for each participant. The diagrams below show the display from both a Lync client (left) and a Group Series 500 (right) with each having 5 video participants displayed:
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