Video Conferencing for FREE

Note: The post below is intended for ppl having a min. on 128 Kbs bandwidth.

I know as soon as you saw the heading you thought that I know how to do that. But what about the quality, ease and expandability??

What we usually do (my friends and I) is that if its a one-on-one chat session we always use Skype since it is painless to set-up and the voice & video quality is always good. Its got mobile-phone quality. Also, please bear in mind that Businesses use Skype, so its the best.

BUT, what if there are 4 ppl who want to video-chat simultaneously? Since Skype only supports one-on-one video chats, what we do is we use Yahoo messenger for video (decent video quality, not too good) and skype for voice this allows us to add unlimited number of ppl to our chat without having to deal with yahoo's pathetic voice quality.

The main problem faced by us during a video-chat is the quality of the whole experience. If the video is fine the audio seems to echo a lot, and if the audio is crisp the video seems patchy. Here is a list of things to do before you video-chat:-

1. Disable all downloads/uploads i.e. close all p2p software( Limwire & Morpheus  etc.) and torrents too.
2. Close Outlook and/or other Email software.
3. Check system resources (right click on taskbar >Task Manager> Performance  tab,) and see if any software/service is hogging too many resources. 
4. Close all unnecessary software. (rule of thumb- keep your task bar as clean as possible- it includes all the small icons you see next to the clock) close every software you are not using and free as much RAM as possible.
5. Use headphones otherwise all the voices will eco. you can use the inbuilt microphone in your laptop/monitor but it is advisable to purchase a headset since it costs not more than Rs. 80-120.

I hope the above helped. If you have any queries, drop me a line and I will be glad to assist you to have rewarding video-chat experience.

PS. I have used MSN, Google Talk -but Skype is the BEST!