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How Does FaceTime Work?

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Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#91

Post by solarkraft »

pfranz wrote: post #89
muststopmyths wrote: post #86

I remember back in the day when FaceTime was announced Apple made a big deal about it using standard protocols throughout the stack ( SIP and maybe WebRTC?) and dangled the hope that there could be 3rd party apps that connected with FaceTime. We were so young and naive then.

The presentation said something like they planned for it to be "open" or something. I believe that was the first the dev team had heard of it. People have guess that patents prevented it from actually being an open standard. Coincidentally, some of those patents expired in the last year or two and the last should expire this year. But I kind of guess the window has passed for it becoming open.

> But I kind of guess the window has passed for it becoming open.

It’s moving there. They’re adding a web interface this year.

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#92

Post by pfranz »

EGreg wrote: post #64
philjohn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because VOIP hadn't come along, so they had a monopoly and could charge pretty much what they wanted. They switched to digital because it reduced their costs, instead of multiple trunk lines you could get away with fewer fibre lines.

Why didn’t they compete with each other to bring costs down? You mean they had a cartel for decades, kept prices artificially high, didn’t compete and the government did nothing? Yeah sounds like the cablecompanies…

> Why didn’t they compete with each other to bring costs down?

I remember that happening in the 90s due to deregulation and breakup of at&t. 10-10-321 had a lot of commercials in the 90s[1]. I'm sure they're on YouTube. Most people I knew would go to a convenience store to buy a pre-paid card for long distance. 1-800-collect was a similar service that had a bunch of ads for calling collect.

It kind of makes calling confusing (and required going to a store and buying something upfront), but I remember younger people (who probably weren't paying for the landline at home) never really considered using their home phone's long distance service. I think most landline services kept their high prices because the few that used it were too lazy or didn't know better. I wouldn't be surprised if it's still expensive (I haven't had a landline in over a decade).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-10-321#History

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#93

Post by epicureanideal »

caddybox wrote: post #61
sgt wrote: post #3

FaceTime is amazing. I keep in touch with my entire family using FaceTime video, often across thousands of kilometers. It's also such an equalizer, allowing even the non-computer literate to use it and focus on the actual conversations. In fact, my 103 year old grandmother is able to do video calls with me, which is great because I rarely see her in person these days. I don't think there exists an alternative she wou…

I think it is unfair to label a platform with a two hundred dollar entry barrier as an equalizer. VoIP and allied technologies are the real enablers and ad-supported platforms like WhatsApp et al. have been true equalizers by allowing anyone to communicate with anyone at marginal costs. The ease of picking up the phone and calling somebody with no consideration of cost has enabled so many people to connect and commun…

> I think it is unfair to label a platform with a two hundred dollar entry barrier as an equalizer.

Even in poor areas, lots of people are walking around with iPhones. $200-500 gadgets are not out of the range of poor people. That works out to less than a dollar a day.

One time amortized expenses aren't that much of a barrier, from what I've seen. The real barriers the poor face are things like high rents, high medical cost, high cost of education, etc.

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#95

Post by mod50ack »

dekoruotas wrote: post #58
throwthere wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semi-related question since I'm looking to get my grandma setup. Waffling between an iPhone and iPad, maybe an iPad mini but don't know if the air would be better (lighter I think). What device does your grandma use to FaceTime? Do you know does she do anything else with it?

Just three days ago I've set up my 93 year old grandfather on a Lenovo Smart Display 7. I think it has multiple benefits over an iSomething: - Always plugged in - no need to remember to charge - Shows our family picture albums that I can remotely update via my Google Photos - It is loud. Left the volume at 3/4 - Sits on a table and you're never holding it wrong™ - No settings to mess up, two previous tablets were too…

For the past few years I've had my grandma using a Linux desktop (for her, it's always the year of the Linux desktop!) She has no idea how to use the system, but I just lock it down for the most part, exposing mostly Skype and a solitaire game, and giving myself full access to SSH and x11vnc (through SSH, with my key required, of course).

To her, it's almost like a television, as family members are able to call her and even initiate calls. (Although we often have to call her on the normal phone to get her to realize that we're calling her on her computer, or to plug it in --- this is the one thing she does do with the hardware.)

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#96

Post by pfranz »

imagine99 wrote: post #10

Can anyone recommend a similar service that provides true high-quality video chat functionality on par with FaceTime but not requiring Apple hardware (but still easily usable on mobile)? We're looking for such a service for use in developing countries where iPhones are rare and connectivity is often mediocre at best. Tests with the like of Telegram, Duo and others have been okay-ish for voice-only calls but pretty ba…

This wasn't focusing on 1:1 calls, but a couple years ago we tested all the video chat services we could access. We had offices spread across India, Malaysia, and the US with varying qualities of connection and many people working from home. Zoom had the best results when working with a poor connection. I'm not sure I'd say the peak quality was as good as FaceTime.

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#97

Post by blacksmith_tb »

scatterhead wrote: post #75
acdha wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This substantially the opposite of my experience so I’d bet there is some factor for proximity to CDNs or traffic shaping done by your ISP. FaceTime is rock-solid; Zoom is also good but has noticeably lower video quality (but good noise handling). Meet’s native apps are good but their browser UI is coded to break Firefox so I don’t use it much.

So it sounds like Facetime's Firefox support is better in your experience?

Facetime doesn't work in any browser, does it? On macOS and iOS it uses a dedicated app, the protocol is proprietary so no 3rd part clients exist?

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#98

Post by ftio »

solarkraft wrote: post #91
pfranz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The presentation said something like they planned for it to be "open" or something. I believe that was the first the dev team had heard of it. People have guess that patents prevented it from actually being an open standard. Coincidentally, some of those patents expired in the last year or two and the last should expire this year. But I kind of guess the window has passed for it becoming open.

> But I kind of guess the window has passed for it becoming open. It’s moving there. They’re adding a web interface this year.

That web interface is a customer acquisition and retention play.

It enables FaceTime users to stay in the ecosystem when their friends don't use the platform they do (vs going to Zoom, which is available for everyone). And it enables non-users to get a taste of FaceTime without before they buy an iPhone.

It's a brilliant move, but I wouldn't call it open. Maybe "open enough" :D

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#99

Post by myself248 »

kkielhofner wrote: post #44
TonyTrapp wrote: post #20

Strange preamble: I found the quality of analog landlines to be terrible. Since we got switched over to VoIP, the voice quality is crystal-clear if the person on the other end also has a VoIP connection. It almost sounds too good. Better than most online voice chat stuff.

Interesting human psychology note: I was involved in some early deployments of HD-ish codecs. HD codecs are considered to be anything that provides greater than the (less than) 4kHz frequency response of the traditional PSTN. At the time "HD audio" was generally 8kHz frequency response (16 kHz sampling rate because of Nyquist-Shannon[0]). This was around 2009 and many users, having not experienced that kind of freque…

That's funny, because I remember missing breath sounds when switching to digital cellular. That plus the added latency still makes it difficult to converse sometimes.

It's weird to me how, after a century of obsessive attention to quality and latency all throughout the whole analog era, through the digital isochronous transition, and up into the first-gen analog cellular system, digital cellular was so much cheaper that we just rolled over and accepted all the terrible compromises. It's not like customers who preferred AMPS had the choice to stay on it.

Only recently have I experienced VoIP calls that start to claw back some of that lost quality. Frequency range, bit depth, maybe even latency if I'm lucky. I don't think we'll ever again have it as good as ISDN, but I can dream.

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#100

Post by miki123211 »

> For those of you old enough to remember landlines, it reminds me of those [...] When we all switched to cell service audio quality took a huge hit

As a blind person with a lot of friends in different corners of the world, audio quality is very important to me. Surprisingly enough, I've seen side projects that took a weekend to develop that had much better quality than what mainstream services offer. Part of it is probably because of bandwidth costs, but I guess effects (like cancelling echos from participants who use speakers instead of headphones, or reducing noise from crappy mics) also play a role.

Facetime's quality is good, but nowhere near what your devices are actually capable of. The only mainstream solution that is actually good is Zoom, when you enable original sound, stereo audio, high fidelity mode and disable a few annoying filters. To do this, the app needs much more fine-grained control of your microphone than you can get from a web browser, so the native client is essential.

Discord with Nitro is pretty decent too, but really niche, obscure, non-mainstream solutions work best. TeamTalk[1] is one great example.

[1] https://bearware.dk/?page_id=327

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