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Jun
22
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After a couple fo attempts to get Video4Skype working I gave up - though early atttempts showed the tool had promise it seems the server infrastructure is either very unreliable or very overloaded. The people hosting this service should have realized than if even a small number of the Skype users decided to try it out - that would be a lot of people (right now Skype is showing 3 million users online).
Anyway, I'd signed up to be notified when the beta of vSkype became available - which it did last week - I downloaded it and yesterday noticed one of my Skype buddies in the UK was online so we decided to give it a quick spin.
Installation was simple and the app. found my web cam / headset with no problems. vSkype integrates reasonably well with Skype though the call initiation is a little kludgy - it uses Skype to send an IM with a URL that the other party needs to click and open in a browser - there they get the option to download and install vSkype or join the call - presumably this whole piece is temporary until they have better Skype integration. This is problematic if you drop off the call and quickly rejoin - depending on what your browser is doing you may get a new session Id. or you may get the old cached id. - so you may not be able to get back into the call.
Once you are in the call, things are pretty smooth - the quality was good (between the UK & California) with no noticable latency - I guess this is more about the quality of Skype's network. We did suffer from some annoying audio echo and didn't get to the bottom of it - I suspect there was some confusion between Skype / vSkype as to which Micorphone / Speaker to use.
One additional featuer that looked promising was the ability to have video conferences - I'll be trying this later when we do a "familly video call". Another not so useful feature (IMO) was the desktop sharing - I guess this is aimed at the enterprise market (not the consumer) but it wasn't a particularly good implementation (vs. say WebEx) and suffered from a 10 second update delay. So the feature maybe good enough for running through a preo. but no good for a real-time demo - and at the end of the day - if you want to share a preso. PDF is the universal format already.
One thing I don't quite understand is what Skype wan't to do with Video over IP - they seem to be aiming for the Enterprise market (with conferencing and desktop sharing features) - I wonder if the consumer market will be abandoned once this stuff is out of beta and has been sufficiently tested. I also don't understand the motivation behind the creators of vSkype and Video4Skype - noone is going to buy these clients nor pay for the service (IMO) - what's their business model ?
For more information - there is a fairly long article on the SkypeJournal.
