What's the highest quality video chat possible?

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Hi,



I video chat with numerous people on a fairly regular basis. I'm on an 8mbps down/512kbps up connection, and the quality of the chat has varied from very poor to very good. I assume that the very poor chats were courtesy of my buddy's crappy internet connection.



The best video chat i've ever had was with a guy who was on a connection that he called "Internet 2." He was running 6mbps down/6mbps up. That's right, 6mbps up. On my end, he looked very close to the quality of a DVD.



So what i'm wondering is, what's the best possible video chat connection that can be achieved? Can two people both see and hear each other as if they were in the same room? Can the connection be so good that the person you're talking to can be displayed full screen on a 30" ACD and look crystal clear? And of course you'd appear the same way to them.



Thanks



edit: oh, and i'm using an iSight, and that guy with the 6mbps/6mbps connection was just using a built in macbook pro camera.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    mr_zebramr_zebra Posts: 85member
    I believe that the current apex of video conferencing is the Cisco Telepresence unit. Not sure how much bandwidth it requires, but it's probably a *lot*.



    Have a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Telepresence



    I've used the smaller one (the one with a single display) and the quality was astounding.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mr_zebra View Post


    I believe that the current apex of video conferencing is the Cisco Telepresence unit. Not sure how much bandwidth it requires, but it's probably a *lot*.



    Have a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Telepresence



    I've used the smaller one (the one with a single display) and the quality was astounding.



    Okayy... what's the best video chat that two people with macs can accomplish over an internet connection?
  • Reply 3 of 4
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by thehellgate911 View Post


    Okayy... what's the best video chat that two people with macs can accomplish over an internet connection?



    The kind where the attractive girl on the other end takes all her clothes off.



    The quality of a video chat is ultimately limited to your upload speed, which is typically a fraction of your download speed. Average is about 256k-384k. You can check what yours is, using one of the many free broadband check websites or your router sometimes tells you.



    It is also limited by the quality of your camera and speed of the computer if it's old.



    640x480 @ 30 fps is possible on good connections. DVD quality is around the 750k-1MBit range. So if your upload speed is only average (256-384), you should manage 320x240 @ 30fps or 640x480 @ 15fps if your chat software compression is good enough (e.g H264, mpeg4).
  • Reply 4 of 4
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post


    The kind where the attractive girl on the other end takes all her clothes off.



    Oh I can easily have that happen during a video chat.. but i'd also like the picture quality to be as good as possible.



    Thanks for the help.
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