Evaluating Asterisk on FreeBSD

[anw]

I'm evaluating the possibility of using Asterisk for a new project on a high speed private Wan network but, being new to this platform, I need for a start to have some basic info on the following points:

1) does Asterisk fully support Live Video communications between single users on the network (like in a way Skype does with it's video chat function) - if so can this live streaming be handled within a browser session with the use of Flash (for example) or do I need to work on specific client based applications in order to have different users of this network interact with each other?

2) being FreeBSD the privileged o.s. for now and the possibility to handle a lot of video based traffic, do I need to deploy a top of the range server (or is more than one better for balance loading?) by any of the major oems such as HP, Dell, etc. ?

3) apart from the server/s, any other piece of hardware equipment needed?

Any feedback will be appreciated.

Thanks.

[rfine]

Asterisk does support live video and the video lives inside the call itself. If you have a device which supports video you can use this between end points.

[rfine]

As far as additional equipment that depends on what you plan on doing with Asterisk. Are you using any analog services from a PSTN? If you are using analog services TDM will be required and you can find Digium cards at the link below:

http://www.asterisk.org/hardware

They support T1 / E1 services or even just simple little FXO / FXS RJ-11 jack implementation. If you're new to Asterisk I would recommend hitting ebay.com also for a starter card to test with.