IVS and the WWW

IVS can interact with the World Wide Web in two ways:

  • You can put links to movies or sounds that were recorded using ivs_record in your HTML pages.
  • You can have a link that will make an IVS call to you or another person that runs the IVS daemon, ivsd.

    • Getting IVS

    If you're outside of INRIA, you'll first have to get IVS, either as source code or precompiled binaries.

    Then, put the IVS binaries (only ivs, ivsd, ivs_record, and ivs_replay are really needed) somewhere in your Unix PATH.

    Configuring your WWW browser

    In order to let your browser (it could be Netscape, NCSA Mosaic, or any other WWW browser) know what IVS files look like and how to play them, you'll have to put the following lines in your mailcap file (usually ~/.mailcap): 
    application/x-ivs; ivs_replay  -clip %s
application/x-ivs-call; ivs `cat %s`
    Put these lines in your mime.types file (usually ~/.mime.types): 
    application/x-ivs       	ivs
application/x-ivs-call		ivs-call
    Add the following lines in your /etc/httpd.conf file: 
    AddType .ivs application/x-ivs binary 1.0
AddType .ivs application/x-ivs-call binary 1.0

    Sending and receiving IVS calls

    In order to be able to receive IVS calls from anybody using IVS over the Internet, you have to run locally the IVS daemon, called ivsd, this can usually be done by inserting the following line in your .xinitrc, .xsession, or .openwin-init file (depending on the way you lauch X, using respectively xinit, XDM, or openwin): 
    ivsd &
    Then just logout and login, ivsd will show up as a small telephone:

    [ivsd]

    You can click on it to send an IVS call, and it will listen for any incoming IVS calls.

    If you want to add a link in a WWW page to make an IVS call to somebody (e.g. you, if you run ivsd), just put in a file the hostname of the machine which runs ivsd (the file name must end by the suffix .ivs-call, e.g. me.ivs-call) and any other ivs options, e.g.: 

    foo.inria.fr -start_send -cif
    Then make an HTML link to this file, and if the mailcap and mime.types files of the persons who reads the page are configured properly as explained before, this link should initiate a call to the the machine indicated in the file (in this case, foo.inria.fr which does not exist) after clicking on the "Call Up" button of ivs.

    Testing your configuration

    Just restart your browser to read the modified mailcap and mime.types files. Now you can test your configuration by playing this audio/video clip of Thierry Turletti.

    You can also initiate an IVS call to anybody who put a link to an ivs-call file in an HTML page (some home pages at INRIA contain links to ivs-call files). This person may or may not reply to your call (just as if you use the Unix talk command or a standard telephone!).

    Last modified: August 16, 1995

    This page has been written by Frederic Devernay