Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Skype 2.0: Peer-to-peer video chat

Skype 2.0 Well in case you missed in Skype 2.0 was released over the summer holidays (right when everyone wasn't watching as Tris Hussey noted). Note that 2.0 has only been implemented for Windows but it's worth downloading anyway to test out the video conferencing capabilities. Eventually I managed to test out a two-way video plus voice conversation across broadband and it worked properly, but not without a few crashes on the part of the other participant – and spontaneous disconnections.

Apparently this release of Skype also includes the ability to redirect calls for the first time, although I'm not sure if this just means to ordinary telephones or if you could have the call redirect to a different Skype account.

According to the website:
The new, shiny Skype 2.0
  • Our best ever call quality.
    • Sounds like empty marketing here, but functioning as a peer-to-peer network gives Skype voice and video chats a real edge over, say, MSN video chat – which I think I only ever used once in my life! And I have an irrational fear of GoogleTalk since their beta release last year caused so many conflicts on my system.
  • Smile, wave or say hello to anyone, anywhere in the world with free one-to-one video conversations.
    • It works, but I didn't try it in a multiway voice chat and am pretty sure it will only display one video per chat window.
  • Easily sort your contacts into groups like 'colleagues', 'friends' and 'family'.
    • I found it only minimally useful, but nice that it can do what MSN Messenger can do to maintain/organise contacts.
  • Display mood messages and your local time, so people know where you are and how you're feeling.
    • This has also been implemented on the latest Mac OSX release.
Skype 2.0 contact list screen shot
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posted by Lisa at 9:20 am

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

OH MY GOD! You've posted! :-).

Need to download 2.0. Somehow I missed it... I don't have a webcam though, so it probably won't make much difference for me.

February 07, 2006 9:18 pm  
Blogger Lisa said...

Well, sure, not everybody wants to do video phone conversations, but knowing that Skype *can* do it now is useful I hope.

And, yeah, sorry for the BIG haitus in blog posts. On the one hand, if I was paid to do it, the blogging would happen regularly without fail, but on the other hand, not being paid to blog is what keeps us *real* in what we blog about.

February 09, 2006 6:24 pm  

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