Polycom Room Systems now supports native Lync2013 SVC

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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By going into the web UI of the Group Series system, we are able to look at the call statistics of this session. The diagram below shows the Group Series transmitting a single SVC stream at 304x176 to the AVMCU whilst receiving 3 video streams simultaneously. These 3 incoming streams are at various resolutions and bit rates as well as different video codecs including 2 SVC streams from Lync 2013 and another Group Series 500, and an RTV stream from a Lync 2010 client:

Audio is using G.722 at 64Kbps for both transmit and receive. Clicking on "More Info" on the right of each stream brings up another window providing details of that particular stream. For example, the RTV stream from the Lync 2010 client is showing that MS FEC is being used:

As shown, having the Group Series natively support the AVMCU signaling and SVC codec allows for the system to display multiple streams of video from up to 5 participants. But what happens when someone locks the video spotlight on a single participant? In this case the only the locked participant will display on all clients. In the diagram below, the meeting organizer has locked the video spotlight on the Group Series participant, resulting in only the video stream from the Group Series being shown on all clients:

Going back to the web UI of the Polycom Group Series, we can see now that it is only transmitting a single SVC stream plus 1 RTV stream of itself to the AVMCU. If there was no Lync 2010 participant in this call then no RTV stream would have been transmitted. We can also see that the Group Series is no longer receiving any video stream from the AVMCU since the video spotlight is being locked on itself:

Conclusion
The 4.1.3 firmware is available for download at the Polycom website here. One final point to note is the call scenarios described in this article requires that the Group Series has the Lync Interoperability License option, formerly known as the RTV/CCCP license option. Without this license option then the Group Series will not be able to make and receive calls from Lync 2013 clients nor participate in AVMCU conferences. To purchase this license option, contact your local Polycom sales office.