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Are Videophones Ready for Prime Time?
Amigan asks: "Looking for a gift for my parents who live 1500+ miles away, I came across the Vialta Beamer TV. This device, with its claimed ease of use, would be helpful for my parents to see my son via the phone, but I'm wondering if the glowing WSJ review or Tech TV review are for real. Is 4-15 fps viable for conversation?"
It is ~30 fps on LAN and it is useable, as in voice and video are coherent, picture is abit shaky but not painful. You can't move fast though
or else it'll be a blur.
However we use it to talk coast-to-coast. On
university-to-university network you get ~20 fps
and the quality degradation is notable. Now you
get a picture that is a bit retarded and when
someone moves (even medium speed) it results in
unhappiness.
Put the sucker on cable modem and you get 10 fps.
Now it is virtually unusable in the sense that you
are not getting much more than voice and what you
do get is painfully choppy and often artefacted.
IMHO, anything below 15 fps is not even worth
consideration.
Consider this:
Movies are 24 FPS.
TV is 30 FPS (NTSC) or 25 FPS (PAL). (frames per second, not fields per second).
The "killer app" for video phones is not business conferencing - it is "Look at Grandma! Wave to Grandma!".
And we USED to use postcards (1 frame per WEEK) for that.
www.eFax.com are spammers
... to give the impression of continuous movement due to the idiosyncrasies of human perception.
Thats why the old fashioned 8mm movies were (usually) shot at that speed.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Well, you could buy a pre-packaged setup like the Beamer, which would let you video-conf with any other Beamer users.
Or you could use a webcam and open standards, and be able to chat with any other PC/Mac users with a webcam
Reminds me of the first Soviet company to get a FAX machine. They were quite proud of themselves, until they realized they didn't have anyone else to call.
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