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Schaller: The long journey towards good free video conferencing

Schaller: The long journey towards good free video conferencing

Posted Oct 16, 2012 22:58 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Schaller: The long journey towards good free video conferencing by Richard_J_Neill
Parent article: Schaller: The long journey towards good free video conferencing

> It pains me to say this, but Skype get it right, and nobody else does.

While it really sucks in many other ways, the way Skype can cope (in real time!) with the most hostile network conditions never stops to amaze me.

The very first Skype version was written by the Kaaza developers - and it still shows.

Using central servers hosted in massive compute farms is cheating; too rich, too easy!

I didn't get a chance to test Skype with IPv6 yet, do they support it too?


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Schaller: The long journey towards good free video conferencing

Posted Oct 16, 2012 23:06 UTC (Tue) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link]

Skype is really clever at trying multiple workarounds. It can do direct connections, STUN, use a peer2peer approach to use a 3rd-party's bandwidth (which saves skype costs of a central server), or use a skype.com server. It also adapts to use the available ports. If it were only an open protocol, I'd strongly recommend it.

Schaller: The long journey towards good free video conferencing

Posted Oct 23, 2012 2:38 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Direct, STUN, and proxied are all pretty easy to implement (especially with help like https://github.com/jselbie/stunserver ).

I haven't heard of the peer2peer approach. Any more info or code on this?

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