Video chat applications
May. 9th, 2016 07:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcMy mother likes to be able to do video chat with me but my parents' ADSL broadband connection perhaps isn't great and she is challenged by learning a new non-trivial interaction with the computer.
Years ago I had installed Ekiga for her but we had ongoing connection issues that the developers didn't. Mostly it would somewhat work but not reliably. At my end I also experimented with other SIP/H.323 clients like Linphone. We have had some success with Google Hangouts but I don't like the idea of closed source solutions (I'd especially like to avoid Skype, Zoom, etc.) and as Google distribute the Hangouts plugin as deb/rpm packages rather than as an xpi or suchlike it would be a pain to install on Void Linux anyway. So, I thought I'd try something WebRTC-based, but an attempt using appear.in seems to have foundered: after a minute or so one of us freezes and drops out, it's again unreliable. If that means I should expect the same of other WebRTC-based sites I don't know.
I never have such issues when using various means to videochat with work colleagues so I am guessing that the problem's at my parents' end. While I suppose my parents' BT HomeHub might be doing something bad to the traffic, my guess is simply that, of the people I speak to like this, my mother's the one whose Internet connectivity most resembles a piece of wet string and that what I need is some software that's rather robust in the face of that.
It's all rather disappointing anyway. This kind of software has been widely available for many years now, it should just work at this point. Annoyingly, if I used untrustworthy closed-source stuff, I expect that it indeed would work just fine.
Years ago I had installed Ekiga for her but we had ongoing connection issues that the developers didn't. Mostly it would somewhat work but not reliably. At my end I also experimented with other SIP/H.323 clients like Linphone. We have had some success with Google Hangouts but I don't like the idea of closed source solutions (I'd especially like to avoid Skype, Zoom, etc.) and as Google distribute the Hangouts plugin as deb/rpm packages rather than as an xpi or suchlike it would be a pain to install on Void Linux anyway. So, I thought I'd try something WebRTC-based, but an attempt using appear.in seems to have foundered: after a minute or so one of us freezes and drops out, it's again unreliable. If that means I should expect the same of other WebRTC-based sites I don't know.
I never have such issues when using various means to videochat with work colleagues so I am guessing that the problem's at my parents' end. While I suppose my parents' BT HomeHub might be doing something bad to the traffic, my guess is simply that, of the people I speak to like this, my mother's the one whose Internet connectivity most resembles a piece of wet string and that what I need is some software that's rather robust in the face of that.
It's all rather disappointing anyway. This kind of software has been widely available for many years now, it should just work at this point. Annoyingly, if I used untrustworthy closed-source stuff, I expect that it indeed would work just fine.
