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New Skype Update Is Horrible

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Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#45
post #7

I have witnessed Skype to go from almost perfect video & chat communicator to absolute crap over almost 10 years, and I feel very sad that it has come to rip off Snapchat. There is no alternative like the old Skype now in the desktop.

I have high hopes for Discord video, which is coming out soon. Knowing the discord team and seeing the quality of the voice product, I'm finally going to be able to replace god-awful Google Hangouts.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#46

Maybe mine is a lonely voice but I like Skype because: 1. It works. Every other video chat platform I have tried is simply unreliable and crashes. (Skype does so but with far less frequency). 2. Facetime is more reliable, true, but it is the only one and does not allow for group chat. (I have thrown down the gauntlet, and I realize I risk major downvoting for making such a controversial statement, but I cannot sit in…

There’s nothing controversial about what you’ve said - nobody would be P.O.’d if a useless app updated to a horrible UI.

The reason everyone is so angry is that they don’t like/can’t use the new app for the things Skype is good at.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#47
post #10

What could I switch to (on both Mac and PC) that would give me better video chat functionality? Edit: Just to clarify, here's what I'm looking for: 1. Free plan; available everywhere in the world (I have family outside the US). 2. Both Mac and PC clients that are actually good. 3. Video chat quality (including noise filtering and such) that matches or exceeds what Skype can do. 4. IM-like client that supports text, v…

I've used https://meet.jit.si/ for quite some time now... nothing to install, no flash, only needs a plugin if you want to screen-share, works on all platforms.

They were bought by Atlassian recently and they used it to replace the HipChat video/audio chat function.

I'm not sure yet whether you can also use it with the jitsi desktop clients (https://jitsi.org/) seamlessly, but it'd make sense :)

Just saw some news that they also enabled calling into meet.jit.si conferences by phone (https://jitsi.org/news/telephony-support-on-meet-jit-si/) so that's also a bonus point if you liked Skype.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#48
post #39

Video chat and IP telephony apps seem like some kind of software lemon market. There's some kind of perverse incentive operating here. Even ones that start out nice inevitably degrade over time. FaceTime used to be nice if you were all Apple, but when they removed P2P it went to crap. The performance got terrible. Lately I've been using appear.in, which works if you have a webrtc browser or you use the app. It works…

I don't know. FaceTime is my go to choice for video calls, and I use it almost daily. I wouldn't say the performance is terrible, and it doesn't spin up my MBP's fans like Google Hangouts does in the browser.
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