I don’t exactly know what Steve Jobs is talking about when he praises iChat AV‘s capabilities to the heavens. On every Keynote (such as the the one from last week) we witness the crystal clear video when Steve calls Phil, or the other way around. My own experience however speaks a completely different language! As more and more of my friends finally find their way to an Apple computer, I had the opportunity to do a three-way video conference (plus one audio-only participant).
I have a stunning comparison for you.
Apple’s idea of video conferencing:
What we got (or: the reality?):
I don’t know the reason why it was this bad. We found out, that the one who hosted the conference had the best quality. The one that joined last, got pure crap!
We all had decent connections of at least 1 MBit per second, but I merely got an constant upload of 15 KB/sec during the conference. Incoming was about the same traffic. So I guess it must be the AIM Server – or whatever is in between – that is so damn slow. Can you only get the real deal when there is a direct connection?
All three video feeds came from iSight cameras built in MacBook Pros, so no excuse from the technological side.
The last one to join only got piles of pixels:
In the beginning we couldn’t get more than a one-to-one conference working, because two of the guys had their Quicktime streaming setting on automatic. It seems you have to set it above the actual requirement (of your connections speed) for video conferencing in iChat AV. (As I said: we all had decent connections.)
After all, we were somewhat disappointed.
We then tested Skype‘s Audio conferencing abilities and I must say: the sound quality is WAY better. (Not that I was surprised.) I haven’t had the chance to really test video conferencing. Only a quick one-on-one test, which was not very significant.
Similar experiences anyone? Or tips how you get better video quality?