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Video for Skype Users
Kozmik writes "Looks like the first of likely many video plugins for Skype has arrived. Dialcom claims the plugin which works with Skype, will provided end to end encrypted video that will work behind NATs, proxies and firewalls. Currently only supports Windows."
Good point, well made.
Webcams and video conferencing have been around for a while and are pretty damn easy.
What I needed was an out of the box simple to use VOIP that I could give my mother and she could understand.
Skype filled that perfectly.
That it then went and replaced my home phone, gave me numbers in Manhattan, London and Stockholm are all benefits.
What I didn't need was video conferencing though... didn't then, still don't.
Sound is vastly more important than vision on these things.
What do you think you'll benefit from when one or the other fails? Sound or vision?
What I really need, and what I shall be arsed to code very soon, is an Outlook plugin so that my girlfriend can easily call people from within Outlook without it playing up on her.
Plugins should offer small fine tuning and niche functionality... not fundamental changes and bloat.
PS: Slashdot does not like TOR
That is the big selling point though. There's really no config required to use it behind a NAT box. This makes things a lot simpler for a lot of people. Even if users on both ends are behind NAT boxes, the traffic if forwarded through a 3rd party PC so that at least one end of the data is coming from a public IP.
This is a big bonus for home users and those who don't know how or don't want to play with the settings on their router.
I worked at a videoconferencing startup for about 2 years. We had (and the company still has) top of the line video that can tunnel through any NAT, Firewall or Proxy. We could just install and go, as long as there was a connection to the internet. (No opening ports, no tweaking for performance, we took care of everything.)
We were easily extensible (include a macro and inherit from our base class..that's it). Our UI could be tweaked,rebranded and basically made to look however you wanted.
Our video could get 30 fps over a standard DSL connection. ISDN could get about 10. The biggest problem we had was convincing people that the video feed really was live. About 9 out of 10 thought we were streaming over the net. 1 in 10 throught we were playing a local video...until they started conversing with the person.
(our audio was on par with skype's although, I will give them a bit of an edge...)
So to sum up: top of the line video, audio equivalent to skype, extenisble, all of the good stuff. We had caught the eye of several groups that evaluate videoconferencing and got their highest honors.
All of that is leading up to this: We were absolutely TERRIFIED of skype. Not only was skype providing for free what we wanted to charge for, BUT they have an absolutely FANTASTIC marketing team. Think about it, they went from 0 to market leader before they were out of beta!
Yes, there are alot of VC companies out there. But NONE have gotten any traction in the consumer market...that despite massive interest in that market.(Something like 90% of people say they would upgrade hardware and bandwidth for decent VC.) Largely it has to do with setup, it is seen as being difficult by the average consumer. And the other half has to do with the crappy VC software that already exists. ("Oh, I tried VC one time and it was AWFULL" -- we called this the "netmeeting factor".)
If skype video can pull off the same level of marketing, and even get half of the quality we were able to achieve at my old company... well, then they will own the VC market, plain and simple.
Do we really need more crap?
What we need is an ITU-T recommendation for voice and video over NAT. Right now, we've got only H.32x and that simply does not cut it. Enter Skype and now this video add-on to make media communication seamless and easy, regardless of NAT.
The ITU needs to get their act in order and bake up an open standard. One freakin' port please. Yes, I am aware of H.350 but even that is too heavy compared to Skype.
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A four way, hetrogeous video chat shouldn't be a pipedream with todays technology
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
It seems like a lot of people say "Skype is just another VoIP product" when in truth it is, however, it does perform noticeably better than most alternatives.
I have yet to see another H323 based app with such a large user base that is as centralized as Skype. It really is easy to find people I'm looking for that I assumed would have Skype.
Audio quality and compression are also better than many H323 alternatives. Using gnomemeeting and several different codecs, bandwidth usage was much higher than Skype for much lower quality audio.
Integration with the public phone network is a great option also. I make regular calls to our mobile employees and offices in Hong Kong and Shenzhen and so far Skype is our cheapest and most convenient alternative.
Skype has some cool stuff...
Yeah, I don't like the wording of their agreement either:
"You also understand and agree that the Service may include advertisements and that these advertisements are necessary for Dialcom to provide the Service. You also understand and agree that the Service may include certain communications from Dialcom, such as service announcements, administrative messages and the Dialcom Newsletter, and that these communications are considered part of Dialcom membership."
Sounds like agreeing to adware & spam to me...