Video Chat

[joreth]

AIM has high quality video chat capabilities, which is cool.  Apparently you can only use AIM's video chat feature if you have access to the internet router and can reconfigure it.  That sucks for those of us who don't know how to do that, and for those of us who want to use video chat from public places, like Starbucks.

Yahoo has low-quality video chat capabilities, but it works on any computer even if you can't reconfigure the router.  Except if one person has a pc and the other person has a mac, then you can trade video, but not voice chat.

MSN doesn't talk between pcs and macs period.

I found this service called "SightSpeed" which appears to offer free video and voice chat between pcs and macs.  The video quality isn't great, but it does offer a full-screen option with a little PIP of my camera down in the corner.  Unfortunately, I just installed it and don't have anyone to talk to yet, so I can't test it.

Does anyone else know of a good-quality video/voice chat program that works between pcs and macs without configuring the internet router?  Microsoft really doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate with anything that isn't Microsoft-specific in origin, does it?

Comments

SightSpeed

[(Anonymous)]

I'm surprised you say the quality isn't that Good. Most have found it to be, arguably, a higher quality video than iChat.

Perhaps you have your network settings a little low or you are on a bad network? Video conferencing from public locations like Starbucks are really hit and miss as the quality of conferencing vastly varies depending on your connecton.

Perhaps give this a try and then re-attempt your connection with the new settings in mind (use the applet at the bottom)?
http://myvoipspeed.visualware.com/ca/index.html

[james-the-evil1.livejournal.com]

radven reccomended Sykpe to me for cross-platform use, and it's great in that respect wiht MUCH higher quality than Yahoo
Don't know about the router issue tho

[joreth]

Thanks, I used to have Skype but couldn't rememember what it was called for anything yesterday!

[james-the-evil1.livejournal.com]

I'm here to help ;-)