On Sep 28, 2010, at 9:48 PM, Yves Dorfsman wrote: > background: I have never used skype nor facetime.
Whereas I use Skype on a daily basis for text chat (including one-on-one and group multi-chat), and I've used it for both audio chat (group) and video chat (one-on-one). I've also used Skype on portable devices, like the iPhone. > If I read this right, chances are that factime is "just" a very good client > to > standard protocols (and yes some libraries will do a better job at > encoding/decoding H264), which would mean that: My experience with Skype for audio chat is that it's actually not that good -- lots of drop-outs, people getting dropped entirely from the chat, etc.... And everything depends completely on who initiates the chat -- you're probably okay if they're on a high-speed DSL or cablemodem line (>10mbps down and >1mbps up), but you're screwed otherwise. And it seriously, seriously sucks for one-on-one video chat. I have found that iChat does much better video and audio quality, even when talking to an AIM client on the other end. In contrast, Facetime totally and completely blows away everything else I've ever seen in this space, at least with respect to the kinds of systems that individual people can afford. If you want to build a media cave with hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars worth of Cisco or Tandberg equipment, you can certainly do better than Facetime -- at least, with regards to the quality of the video and audio signals, etc.... But even the most expensive equipment you can buy cannot possibly hold a candle compared to Facetime with regards to how trivially easy it is to actually make that connection and start using the service. Now, instead of comparing Facetime on an iPhone to Skype on a desktop computer, let's compare them both to the same hardware platform. On any handheld device I've ever seen, Skype seriously, majorly sucks huge planetoid size boulders, just with trying to keep up with group text-mode chat. Any irc client from the past ten-plus years would do (and does) far, far better. The problem is that few people on desktop computers these days know anything about something like irc, or are able to install and configure the software so that it works for them. In contrast, Facetime on the iPhone is the most trivially simple piece of software to configure -- Apple has already done all the hard work for you. -- Brad Knowles <b...@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
