Then our eldest son moved to Shanghai, and started a video production
house, making commercials for some of the world's best-known brands.
Despite the at-times-patchy quality of Chinese communications networks, by getting his clients to open Skype accounts, he has been able to conduct free, quite acceptable videoconferencing sessions via his MacBook Pro, linking three continents.
Eventually he convinced us to take another look. Now the entire Bleeding Edge family seems to be keeping in touch through Skype video calls.
While we still think there are better alternatives than Skype's paid
services, we have to accept that the sheer ubiquity of Skype accolunts makes it a great way of defying distance – provided all the participants have good ADSL or cable connections and the right hardware.
We made our first calls on the Linux version of the Asus Eee PC, which could be – at $499 with webcam and microphone built in – the cheapest and most convenient mobile Skype platform.
The reception at both ends of a link between the Eee PC, a Windows PC and a MacBook Pro was quite acceptable, largely because all the participants had high-speed ADSL.
It takes a bit of fiddling to get videoconferencing up on the Eee PC,
because the webcam is turned off by default, and you have to install the beta version of the Skype Linux package. We adjusted the Asus Eee PC interface so that it started up with a webcam icon which allows us to turn it on and off with a mouse click. You can find out how to do that by searching the wiki and the forums at eeeuser.com.
While we were quite impressed by the performance, there’s no doubt that you’ll get the best possible results using the Windows version of Skype, a 384kbps or higher internet connection, and one of Logitech’s three High Quality Video webcams – the QuickCam Pro 9000, which also comes in a notebook version, and the top-of-the line QuickCam Sphere AF. Those models have Carl Zeiss lenses, and an autofocus system that refocuses images in less than three seconds. We were impressed by their ability to get the best out of available light conditions.
HQV, which gives you 640x480 resolution and up to 30 frames per second video, is the result of an alliance between Skype, its video-compression provider On3, and Logitech to tune their technologies.
Our passion for gadgets, which doesn’t seem to have aged at the same rate as the rest of the brain, attracted us immediately to the Sphere AF, despite the $199 price tag. It has a telescoping arm to adjust the camera height, and motorised tracking. We couldn’t find it when we went shopping, unfortunately, but we picked up a couple of Pro 9000s for $149 apiece at OfficeWorks, and tried them out on several Windows PCs, with different ISPs.
While the performance was better than average even with an older Windows PC and an Optus cable connection, we got by far the best results using PCs with dual-core CPUs and the ADSL 2 services of Internode and iiNet.
Logitech ships its HQV webcams with version 11.1 of its software. Our advice is not to bother installing it. For the best results, you’ll need to install version 11.5. It’s a 29MB download..
You have to complete the Logitech installation before you connect the camera. It sets up the video then tunes the inbuilt microphone. After that you can exit the Logitech software and fire up the latest version of Skype.. Make sure you set your video options from Skype’s Tools/Options menu before trying it out.
If you don't have an HQV webcam, you can probably maximise the resolution and frame rate of your particular hardware using the information at the Skype Developer Zone.
We expect our grand-daughter Indigo will be joining the developer team in a year or two. She really likes videoconferences.