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| Thread ID: 98938 | 2009-04-13 14:40:00 | Free voice & video communication | Knownothing (7989) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 764668 | 2009-04-13 14:40:00 | I have a grandson who is profoundly-profoundly deaf, he lives in Aussie and I would like to communicate with him through video and sound. What hardware and software would I/we need to be able to communicate with each other? I know I would need a webcam and a microphone. What else please? I have heard of Skype, MSN, Yahoo that are all free. How would you rate them for reliablilty & clarity? We both have ADSL broadband connections. I presume that they would be fast enough for one of the above setups. (Heaps better than dialup). How much broadband data would be used in 10 minutes through one of the above setups? TIA |
Knownothing (7989) | ||
| 764669 | 2009-04-13 19:39:00 | Step son keeps in touch with his Father in Sydney using Skype. He just uses the webcam built into his laptop seems fine from what I have seen we don't have a special router or anything. We are on Vodafone(Ihug) max/max and all works well. | gary67 (56) | ||
| 764670 | 2009-04-13 20:37:00 | I use Skype with a mic and my digital camera set to video.I had heard that skype and a webcam will even work on dialup. | kjaada (253) | ||
| 764671 | 2009-04-13 22:31:00 | I highly doubt it, considering Dial-Up at best could attain around 6KB/sec for a 1-way download (Dial-Up is half-duplex), its just not enough to run video. I would highly recommend Gmail + the Video Plugin: mail.google.com That said, if and your son already have an account with the same provider, such as MSN / Yahoo / Skype / Google, it makes sense to use that providers application right? ;) Broadband is good, basic-speed broadband will be sufficient. Webcam + Mic is all you need, and you're away laughing! Good luck, and post back here if you run into troubles :) |
Chilling_Silence (9) | ||
| 764672 | 2009-04-14 00:19:00 | +1 for Skype. Easy to use, simple and audio/video is pretty high quality. Pretty reliable, like most other similar services. I would say 10 minutes of chat on skype would be maybe 100mb or so? Make sure you get a nice clear microphone and webcam, some of the cheap webcams create very bad images indeed....I would get a logitech. As long as its BB it can probably handle it, but do a test on here (http://www.speedtest.net/) on both computers and post the results here, just incase you have really bad BB.. Cheers Blam |
Blam (54) | ||
| 764673 | 2009-04-14 00:38:00 | A standard uncompressed phone call via SIP (g711) uses 112kbps * 2 (Full duplex) / 8 = 28KB/sec. * 60 seconds in a minute * 60 minutes in an hour = 98MB AFAIK Skype uses a combination of iLBC and varying bitrate Speex codecs so you'd like to hope it wouldnt use quite that much ... I'd be horrified if it was! 100MB for 10 minutes is *horrible* ... |
Chilling_Silence (9) | ||
| 764674 | 2009-04-14 00:51:00 | A standard uncompressed phone call via SIP (g711) uses 112kbps * 2 (Full duplex) / 8 = 28KB/sec. * 60 seconds in a minute * 60 minutes in an hour = 98MB AFAIK Skype uses a combination of iLBC and varying bitrate Speex codecs so you'd like to hope it wouldnt use quite that much ... I'd be horrified if it was! 100MB for 10 minutes is *horrible* ... How much do you reckon then? It was only a guess:p 50mb? |
Blam (54) | ||
| 764675 | 2009-04-14 01:09:00 | ~30MB for an hour? | Chilling_Silence (9) | ||
| 764676 | 2009-04-14 02:19:00 | Anyway, Skype would be the best option. Its built for such communication and does it extremely well. Since you both have ADSL connections, speed isnt an issue and data usage shouldn't be one either unless either of you have a very small cap. Get a webcam, a mic and download Skype. Its extremely easy to setup and simple to use. |
beeswax34 (63) | ||
| 764677 | 2009-04-14 03:14:00 | ~30MB for an hour? Thats impossible! I have audio only calls for around an hour and it uses around 80mb! |
Blam (54) | ||
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