I have used Skype to call South America and Asia successfully, as well as within the USA. Skype can be pretty demanding on a home network- I often saw consumer level wireless routers slow to a crawl when one person logged onto Skype. Many new routers have the ability to prioritize and better handle voip packets, but be prepared to pay for better performance, especially with video.
On Feb 12, 2010 8:16 PM, "Kris Tilford" <ktilfo...@cox.net> wrote: On Feb 12, 2010, at 5:17 PM, John Callahan wrote: Yes. It (Skype) works fine on Mac. > I don't know about "fine". I've been attempting to talk with a friend who's visiting the Middle East, and it was a very poor connection. I then called my brother who was in Austin, Texas (I'm in Kansas), and it was equally poor, and even dropped the connection. I think perhaps iChatAV is a better choice for Mac-to-Mac? I believe there are other VOIP programs that are compatible with Skype, so perhaps Skype isn't the best choice, I don't know? >From my minimal experience I wouldn't use the words "works fine" for Skype. Also, I was trying to troubleshoot a webcam and tried using Skype to test the function. I placed a call from one Mac in my home to another Mac in my home, and to my astonishment the video was perhaps twenty or thirty seconds delayed. I've heard of latency, but this was insane. I had the computers in different rooms and it was like a time machine, I could walk into the other room and see the video of what happened half a minute ago. It was bizarre, and no way any meaningful conversation could happen over this connection. I suppose rather than scoping out the direct, lowest latency connection between the two computers, it has to be sent to Bethesda or somewhere the NSA can get their copy? I diverge, but since I mentioned low latency connections, there is a company that's going to do live multi-player video games where the games reside on a host computer, and your computer is basically a dumb terminal. This method has many advantages, which one of the coolest is being able to spectate at multi-player games. There could be a crowd of a million watching two teams play against each other, just like real life sports. The technology they use to find the lowest latency connection should be incorporated into these video VOIP programs. Here's a link to the demo, I thought it was fantastically persuasive IF IT WORKS as it appears to in this demo: <http://www.viddler.com/explore/gamertagradio/videos/160/169.707/> -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4,... -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
