I've just completed setting up the Brooktrout TR1000 4-port analog card on one of our servers and so far my reactions are postive.

There is an intel D/41JCT-LS in my other speech server. The Intel TIM seems to have a fancier UI but fewer configurable options. I like that the ports on the brooktrout card can be configured as bi-directional and can be enabled/disabled arbitrarily.

With the Intel TIM, one merely specifies how many outbound ports one would like. The TIM decides which ports will be allocated to outbound calling and allocates any remaining ports to inbound.

I'm looking forward to experimenting with this bi-directional port capability.

Well, I've just had a Cantanta adventure. We've been setting up a new server to evaluate Cantata's TR1000 speech server card, and since if we're happy we plan to go with a T1 card we decided to go with a farely beefy box (2003 enterprise, 4GB, lots of disk space, redundant everything, etc.)

Well, we installed the Cantata drivers and thought they installed successfully--then we rebooted--and got a "The Boston Host Service service failed to start" message. I called Cantata tech support and got a very friendly tech rep who walked me through the process of uninstalling everything then reinstalling -- but same error message!

I was chatting with her and mentioned that our server had 4GB when she said "Oh! I know what the problem is!" It turns out that there's something called Physical Address Extensions (PAE) support in 2003 Enterprise and that this support is what allows Enterprise Server to support more than 4GB of RAM. Cantanta's current TR1000 driver does not support PAE (the next version will) so the tech rep walked me through altering the boot.ini of our server to disable PAE. Disabling PAE causes our server to think that it has 3.5GB of RAM rather than the 4GB that it actually does but for our purposes this should be fine.

Here's a link to more info about PAE:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx

Here's a boot.ini [operating systems] section with PAE disabled (use the /NOPAE switch)
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003, Enterprise NOPAE" /fastdetect /Execute /NOPAE

I was just looking to find out how to display video on the web. The video to be displayed was given to me as a DVD, and I found that this web site offers an excellent tutorial on how to convert DVD (unencrypted) files to WMV files which can be streamed from a web site.

http://www.jakeludington.com/archives/000386.html