VoIP Toolkit

Story: Skype U-turns on 'second class status' video

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Better late than never I suppose.

I am very glad that Skype have now decided to put back what they call “the garage hack” because I am sure many people will do the hack and have better quality than they do now because there are many web cams on the market Logitech that will function at 640x480 and 25GPS, in fact the Philips PCVC 740K goes one better and will do this at 60FPS provided the users internet speed and bandwidth is good enough.

I have run many test with my Philips 740K at 640x480 and 25FPS and was very impressed with the results considering the original price of the camera which I think was about £50 some 5 years ago, therefore for a 5 year old camera that is pretty good.

Nobody is saying that the new HQ Video is not good, yes it is very good but if people have the alternative equipment to run HQ video or video that they a fully satisfied with even if it is via a hack then they should be allowed to do so. I think they call it freedom of use or the user’s choice to use what equipment they want.

Even now you only have to look at the Skype forum and see that problems that were apparent in the public bets version of 3.6 are still there and have not been resolved why? and the product has been gold for the last week if not more. Surely this situation give paying customers or people who just use the Skype 2 Skype option only very little confidence in the product if they make it gold with the same bugs still in it.

Another thing I can’t understand is this statement by Skype "Very few people used the previous video configuration option, so we were surprised at the reaction of some of these users when the option was removed," how do they know that this was the case are they eves dropping on our IP’s to see where, when and what we are doing. I know they have to monitor the IP for the payment side so that they can deduct money off people’s accounts for each call the make to telephones and mobiles, but that is totally different from normal Skype to Skype audio/video operation.

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