Glynn

I'm hoping some members out there may be able to give me the benefit of their experience re on-line video-chat.

My Son and Daughter (with her two young children) all went out to Oz (Melbourne) 16 months ago. My 2 offspring did their own thing re emigrating, but actually flew out within a day of each other ! We're glad and proud for them, but it was traumatic for us !

I took early retirement in January, and we visited our family for two months later in that month .......... and yes, we didn't want to return to Blighty ! My other half and I would love to eventually retire to Oz, but it looks like I'll need to return to work to build up more cash reserves (Contributory Parent Visa at a current total of almost £30,000 being the only viable option!).

Now down to the IT stuff ..........
We have been experimenting with Yahoo Messenger video-chat to communicate with our Daughter. I currently only have a narrowband connection (and, being thrifty, or is that 'tight' ?) have a 'pay-as-you-go' connection via Tiscali. My computer isn't yesterday's model but has a 1.4 gig speed with 256 MB of SD Ram with an Nvidea GForce 2 graphics card, so the system, in time terms, isn't quite stone-age. I have a 'Logoitech' viewcam, and bought a dearer, rather than cheaper, model so the refresh-rate ought to be reasonable.

The transfer of data during our experiments has been appalling. Speech has, most of the time, been very broken, often unintelligable, and the video image dismal, but would be more acceptable if speech transfer were better.

Have any of you out there had experience of reasonable narrowband video-chat ? If you have and are a 'techie', could you advise me on any obvious experiments I could try to improve communication.
(I've just tried 'Onspeed' with no noticeable difference. My Son in Law is going to install 'Onspeed' as well, but I understand that there may be a technical issue regarding what type of files can be compressed using 'Onspeed, and that it may not be suitable for our particular purpose).

Myself and Son-in-Law getting 'Broadband' is obviously under consideration but, and here is the MAIN question, on a practical level, will we be likely to have acceptable conversation over a b/band link. We can put up with jerky pictures, but theory suggests we will get much smoother image transfer with a 512 MB connection.

I have read magazine articles which indicate our current methodology should provide just about 'adequate' communication, but b/band would be significantly superior. I would love to hear from anyone with practical experience of this method of communicating, rather than just theory.

For the long term we need to 'save our pennies', but if we can actually get to 'see' the kids and the Grandchildren (2 and 5 years) via the Internet in a viable manner, we just must upgrade, as we may possibly not eventually get a residency visa due to a health problem my Wife has. Obviously the cost of b/band is coming down now and the total cost would be offset to a large degree by a reduction in our phone-bill (although with our BT plan, the cost is only about 4.2 pence/minute at weekends if you ignore the up-front payment for our Friends and Family plan).

If anyone replies with 'technical' advice, please be gentle with me and use words of one syllable. The little grey-cells didn't grow up with computers (more like slate and chalk !).
If you've read this far........... many thanks and good luck in your life .
Kind regards, Glynn.

andy thomas

hi glynn,

before I emigrated to Melbourne I experimented with someone already there. Webcamming on msn messenger was fine although the audio never worked or was very broken. Someone on here at the time mentioned Skype. It is free to download and is just like using a telephone. As long as you have speakers and a microphone you can speak to anyone over the internet as if you were on the phone, whats better is you can also run a webcam at the same time within either msn messenger or yahoo or whatever without any interference. But in your case the best thing of all is that it works just as well on a dialup connection as it does on broadband so if you can put up with the freezeframe webcam pictures you can still talk and listen clearly using Skype

go to www.skype.com download the program, get your family members to do the same, install it, pick your usernames and then chat once you have connected to each other

hope this helps, I use skype to chat to friends in the uk and its great, when you use a webcam at the same time they both seem to be synchronised as well

Andy

andy thomas

and by the way, it's FREE

Andy

Glynn

Thanks for the very quick response. I'd read about SKYPE but not spoken to anyone who had used it. It was good to hear a report.

I gather from the mags that SKYPE have a new product .... SKYPEOUT. This will apparently enable PC to telephone links (rather than PC to PC). I'm not sure if this new version is actually released yet (haven't checked their website) or is due for release soon.
I believe I'm right in saying that, as a telephone exchange is used for the very last leg of the link, that a small charge is incurred, but obviously cheaper than telephone link all the way from the UK.

Thanks again for your reply and suggestion re using SKYPE & viewcam in unison (wanted to get to Mornington when we were in Oz, but it's on our list of 'wanted to get there but didn't make it' !). Regards ........ Glynn.

Ady Whit

Hi
My own experiences of chatting through messenger started when my mate said he was moving to Oz some time ago. We experimented in the UK before he left to find the best option. We found we had trouble chatting when one of us was on dial up and not broadband. With broadband installed on both computers it was ok but not great. I then upgraded my computer to windows xp and since then we have happily chatted with camera and sound and it is fantastic. we both have logitech cameras by the way and have found m.s.n or Yahoo messenger equally successfuly.

Glynn

Ady,
Excellent, thanks for your info. I'm already using XP as my operating system and my Son-in-law has just upgraded to it. He has the same Logitech camera as me and has just signed up for a B/band service.
It looks like I need to find the best deal Broadband supplier now. I've just seen that good old Tesco is doing a 512k service with no download limit, free connection and free modem for £19.97/month.
Happy days, Glynn.

wmoore

Glynn, as the others have said, it's not clever on dial-up. We use combinations of MSN and Skype but father-in-law is on dial-up and although video in MSN works OK and sound in Skype works OK, they won't work at the same time. However, they do work together with my mother who is on broadband. To get technical for a second, decent video conferencing needs about 256k and sound about 64k. Bear in mind that a 512k broadband connection only gives 256k in the other direction and you'll see it's not far off.

I have seen a lot of comments from people who say the video is better in Yahoo! than MSN but I haven't tried it properly.

Skype has launched its Skypeout service now. I haven't tried it yet but will in time. It seems like a bloody good idea to me.

You can get broadband for £15 per month so it's not expensive. I have used PlusNet for a few years now and would whole-heartedly recommend them. If you sign up with them, tell them 'wmoore' sent you and I get a discount .

As far as I can tell, Ontrack isn't as good as it's press. Especially for the likes of video-chat - it seems your experience would back this up.

If you get stuck, feel free to PM me and I'll help if I can.
Your PC is up to the job, similar spec to the ones I have built for family fairly recently.

biggy

#I had a tesco dial up account before i left the UK and they were fab !!!

Siren & Brian

We used Netmeeting for 2 years and found it very good

wargod

I am with Telewest - blueyonder on a 768 connection - very good and no upload or download limits, i think it is about £20 or 25 a month.

gedge

I've used dial up at both ends with MS Messenger 6.1. Works fine, if a bit jumpy. Audio and video simultaneously, since getting latest version of messenger.
Broadband should give marked improvement. Your OS probably has little effect, I've tried it between Win98se, 2k and XP. Same with machine spec.

Just a little something, make sure you're lit from in front. Helps the image no end.

itsasecret

To make a voice call over the internet. (Voice over IP) you would probably only use aprox 20kbs of your bandwidth, but if you are sending Voice and Video and using MSN..you are using up more and more available bandwidth. The answer is broadband for Quality. Onspeed effects picture quality , im told it makes them fuzzy, beacuse it is compressing pictures etc..

I recommend doing some research on Voip in Oz, essentially you could subcribe to a service and make free calls between subscribers (or a very small fee.), you just need to shop around.

When you make a call from your PC, its using the internet to make a call, but you cant just rely on this alone, quality comes from the Codec's used by a specialist operator (VOIP operator) etc.. you are far better subscribing to a service if you intend on making calls and video over the internet.

In short 56k dialup for voice should be ok, but if you start surfing or start video it will be effected big time. Broadband will offer better transfer rates and it will make Video much more pleasing.
Keep in mind that "Home" Broadband you share your bandwidth with neighbours on the same street cabinet, but should be ok for voice&Video again depending on what else your doing on your computer at the time.

I hope this helps.

Glynn

Collective Thanks.
A big thank-you to all of you for your replies imparting your knowledge/experience. Thanks to you I can now make an appropriate decision 'no worries'.
ps For future ref. is there a way I can send replies direct to people rather than clutter up the original posting ? I couldn't find this subject in the faq's.
Happy days ............... Glynn

wmoore

You can send a private message 'PM' to anybody by clicking on their name, and then on Send Private Message on the menu that appears. That kind of message does exactly what it says on the tin and can't be seen by anyone else.

stevereed

I run Skype, which is superb for the conversation, and also Logitech Videocall (which works with the logitech webcams but maybe others too) for the video.

I found that running both audio and video on the same program was not brilliant, but the seperate video and audio programs running at the same time seems to work better. Skype really is superb, and the logitech videocall software allows a good sized video picture.

We are both on broadband though.