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10.3 PB - XP videochat, bandwidth?
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: TX
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Hey all, I've looked up some of the earlier topics on webcams, but was wondering if any of you could help me out with some questions that I don't think have been discussed before.
Here's the background: I want to videochat with my girlfriend who's in the UK. I'm on 1 GHz RevB Powerbook, she's on an XP celeron notebook. >> Now the wildcard is this, what we do makes us pretty mobile, so we sometimes have broadband, and sometimes dial up ISPs.
So my question is simply, what would be the best set up for us to videochat? We're cool with getting firewire and/or USB2.0 webcams, price is not a biggie. But what are the softwares or services that would reliably support both high and low bandwidths for videochat?
I thought iChat looked promising, but it lists broadband as a requirement for iChat AV... anyone out there who's tried videochatting using iChat AV on low bandwidth? Thanks in advance!
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 2002
Location: Washington, DC
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I'm not 100% sure, but I thought you could audio chat over dial up at least using iChat. No video though.
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Senior User
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Nebraska
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With broadband for both of you, you can use both video/audio. Your girlfriend will have to get a USB 1 or 2.0 web cam if her computer doesn't have firewire. You can get the Apple iSight which is probably the best web cam ever made.
When one or both of you are on dial-up you will not be able to do video. Dial-up is just too slow to handle the audio and video. Audio chat should work just fine.
Sworthy's right...you just have the option for audio.
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[Riding a circus elephant]
Peter: Look Lois, the two smybols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change. - Family Guy
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: TX
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Thanks for the input! I guess I'm being greedy  Is there no chance at all for any software or service out there that will support video when either of us are on dial-up bandwidth? I'm running 10.3 btw...
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Senior User
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Nebraska
Status:
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Originally posted by KidKit:
Thanks for the input! I guess I'm being greedy Is there no chance at all for any software or service out there that will support video when either of us are on dial-up bandwidth? I'm running 10.3 btw...
Not likely. No matter what the software would do it wouldn't be worth it. It would compress the image quality down so bad that you couldn't make out the image and the window for the image would have to be really really small. Dial-up just doesn't have the bandwidth for images, graphics, gaming, or fast downloads at all no matter what magic software comes along that charges you $$$ for "faster" speeds on dial-up or those dial-up accelerators that claim to make your dial-up speeds up to 5 times faster all they do is lower the image quality so images don't take forever to load and people paying extra for that could just as easily turn images off in Internet Explorer or whatever browser they use and same the money. In short there's no piece of software to boost your connection speed on dial-up, what you connect at is what you get.
(Last edited by Applefreak01; May 8, 2004 at 07:44 PM.
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[Riding a circus elephant]
Peter: Look Lois, the two smybols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change. - Family Guy
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