[jamra]

I use Skype everyday to communicate with family abroad. I have a camera mounted on my television. The quality of Skype is abysmal. Most of the time, you do not have HD video.

When I switch over to using facetime, the video quality is amazing. I don't know what happened to Skype, but its quality is by far the worst available on the market.

[bertil]

> The quality of Skype is abysmal. Most of the time, you do not have HD video.

That comment reminded me of what Louis CK says about wifi on the plane — or attitude towards technology in general. I won’t link because the swear ratio is… well he uses all the possible syntactical options of the f-bomb.

The quality difference is striking, and Skype pales in comparison. But live video feed between common computers is something that, no matter the quality of the feed, should still be seen as the miracle that it is, and somehow only seem so to too few users. Doing that with limited central server is even more impressive. It might not be enough to gather facial expression, and that is a real problem for their offer. But what they do remains the result of ten years of high level engineering, with broad room for progress in many circumstances.

[unoti]

I appreciate the Louis CK argument, but when it comes to communication it doesn't fully apply. Have you ever had a terrible cell phone connection in which you can make out the words but conversation isn't really free and easy? Then you switch to Skype or another medium where you can hear each other with radically improved quality and less latency and then the conversation progresses more smoothly and rapidly?

The same can happen with video. A low quality video connection is a mere novelty, doing little to improve the conversation. A high quality video connection, though, can dramatically improve the conversation. For example, you can watch the expression in your partner's face to see when they are confused, or disagree, or you need to slow down or go faster, and if your points are resonating and connecting.

The Louis CK principle does apply, yes, its amazing. But just as video opens doors not available to audio calls, high quality video calls open many doors that low quality video calls do not.

[jamra]

When I'm trying to introduce my baby to his grandparents overseas and he can't really make them out, I really feel the loss. They sing to him and he can hear it alright, but I also want him to follow their faces.

If the connection is just too poor for whatever reason, it's acceptable, however, when facetime works so well while we are connected to the same wifis, the problem is in Skype.

[calbear81]

Yeah, I don't know what the heck is wrong with Skype either. On video calls, the quality is lacking most of the time and even though we're both on fast broadband connections, the "call quality" is still a 3 out of 5 bars. Switch to Google Hangouts and everything works fine with a lot less connectivity issues.

[innoying]

The problem is Skype recently moved to a centralized infrastructure instead of a P2P which has caused terrible issues for pretty much everybody. Allegedly this was done to allow the NSA to snoop on conversations easier.

[astrange]

Allegedly according to whom?

P2P infrastructure isn't realistic when most of your clients are on mobile. Skype used to drain your battery simply by logging in for an hour. Now it doesn't!

Skype and G+ use the same codec families as well, so the differences would be in bandwidth allocation.

[skeletonjelly]

It wasn't P2P for everyone, they had "servers" in the P2P network called supernodes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_protocol#Peer-to-peer_ar...

The battery drain could be from anything. I'm not sure if they use GCM (Google Cloud Messaging) to reduce battery these days but without looking at the code I don't think you could say switching to a centralised server model fixed the battery issues.