191–200 of 212 posts
"it’s free to call numbers in the U.S. and Canada" It's great that expensive international calls are a thing of the past by now but is this really the right way to go? I'm in the UK - do I have to pay international rates to call UK numbers or will I just not be able to call from the UK 'yet'?
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Video chat options in general frustrate me to no end. Skype - at least on Linux - have steadily dropped in quality over the last few years (the old cynic in me wants to blame MS for no particular reason). Back in 2006-2007 I used Skype video chats daily with few issues between the UK and California. These days I have problems getting it to work reliably within London, and have given up on it to let my son talk to his…
skype on android is really, really bad. it doesn't even bother to tell you if your wifi is turned off. it'll just "ring ring ring ring" then show a message that the person wasn't available.
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Video chat options in general frustrate me to no end. Skype - at least on Linux - have steadily dropped in quality over the last few years (the old cynic in me wants to blame MS for no particular reason). Back in 2006-2007 I used Skype video chats daily with few issues between the UK and California. These days I have problems getting it to work reliably within London, and have given up on it to let my son talk to his…
I'll be down-voted, although I solved the problem with: .. FaceTime. If you don't have a mac you can get a ipod touch. That's what I use to talk with my family USA->Italy. Is the only thing I found that is reliable and has a quite good quality.
So, perhaps Skype and GV are suffering from over-extended networks? It must be hard to justify investing in better network infrastructure for a free product (or when your revenues are minimal). On that note, I don't get the impression that BlackBerry's network has much of a problem with network load these days...
I'm using a sip provider with much better international call rates than this, however I understand that free calls in the US is really good. I don't have contacts in the US though. I'm using voipstunt.com now with qutecom (after I really fed up with Skype) but there are many similar providers. I'm making phone calls 0.01 EUR/min + VAT to mobile in Hungary (where I live) which is not free but still much better than ot…
How's the quality of your provider? I've been using MegaVOIP (also fed up with Skype) and it's getting terrible.
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I stand 100% behind your statement. I can't stand to use Hangouts. I remember when you could simply have a video chat plugin installed in Google Chat with HD feature enabled in labs and CPU usage wouldn't be a quarter what a video chat in Hangouts is now. I dream that they still had the option to use the older video chat functionality.
Video chat options in general frustrate me to no end. Skype - at least on Linux - have steadily dropped in quality over the last few years (the old cynic in me wants to blame MS for no particular reason). Back in 2006-2007 I used Skype video chats daily with few issues between the UK and California. These days I have problems getting it to work reliably within London, and have given up on it to let my son talk to his…
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Video chat options in general frustrate me to no end. Skype - at least on Linux - have steadily dropped in quality over the last few years (the old cynic in me wants to blame MS for no particular reason). Back in 2006-2007 I used Skype video chats daily with few issues between the UK and California. These days I have problems getting it to work reliably within London, and have given up on it to let my son talk to his…
I work for a startup in the commercial video space, and one of the reasons we can compete against such giants is that their software really doesn't work that well... even for people who've paid shedloads for Lync.
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I don't understand why hangouts has to use so much CPU. I have a top of the line, brand new laptop, and using hangouts never fails to heat it up and get the fans going. In contrast, a multi-way video chat on http://appear.in has much more stable audio and video quality, somehow doesn't require half of my CPU, and doesn't even require a plugin. My team is distributed, and we use hangouts every day, so this has not bee…
Perhaps this is why: http://www.androidcentral.com/google-moves-hangouts-vp8-offe... Instead of hardware accelerated h264 (almost all chipsets have hardware decoding/encoding of h264), they use their own VP8/9 - which is decoding/encoding on CPU Also the reason why Google Glass can't do Hangouts - not powerful enough for software encoding. They should just use h264.
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Might also be ISPs introducing traffic management and whatnot.
It should be possible to test and analyze this.
Here is an report sample: http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/restore/id=example-session
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Video chat options in general frustrate me to no end. Skype - at least on Linux - have steadily dropped in quality over the last few years (the old cynic in me wants to blame MS for no particular reason). Back in 2006-2007 I used Skype video chats daily with few issues between the UK and California. These days I have problems getting it to work reliably within London, and have given up on it to let my son talk to his…
skype on android is really, really bad. it doesn't even bother to tell you if your wifi is turned off. it'll just "ring ring ring ring" then show a message that the person wasn't available.
Until Hangouts provide the ability to properly control one's visibility, I Will. Not. Use. Them. Full. Stop. It's somewhat amusing to see Google finally reintroducing functionality which worked perfectly well in GChat years ago. But sad when I reflect on how I now spend so much less time using the Google ecosystem, thanks to their constant dismantling (Reader), deprecation (GChat), divestment (Sketchup), and defacing…
Out of curiosity, did you happen to pay for any of those things you are complaining about? Edit: To folks down voting... That is totally fair, this was a useless negative comment on my part. Regardless, it seems unnecessary to avoid using a product that it might get changed.
Personally, I date this to the announcement that they would be putting "more wood behind fewer arrows".[1] Prior to that, Google's product offerings had been comprehensive but scattershot -- but most of their individual products were lean, elegant, and very effective at what they did. By putting "more wood" into those products, they've somehow fallen into a very old-world fallacy of software development: the idea that quality scales with manpower. But overloading a team with software engineers doesn't produce better software -- just bloated software. As somebody who is generally an admirer of Google's, I find this unfortunate.
1: http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fe...