Home > Tom's Blog > Fun with Skype

Fun with Skype

May 30th, 2008

>????????you’ve heard us bitch and complain about Skype. Many of you wonder what could be the big problem. Well, it is partially our fault and partially Skype’s fault. First of all, Skype is a resource hog. That is a fact. But that doesn’t make much of a difference if all you are doing is making a Skype call, but we’re doing more than that. We’re making a podcast.

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  1. Kolia
    June 2nd, 2008 at 20:00 | #1
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    How about good old analogue recording followed by digital encoding?

    Alexandre

  2. Tom
    June 3rd, 2008 at 10:19 | #2
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    Looks like someone hacked this post. I’m working on recovering it now.

  3. Andrew
    June 3rd, 2008 at 12:40 | #3
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    The problem with skype is you just don’t have that much control over how it works. If the person who is receiving skype calls has a port open on their router and has port forwarding set up, that is about all you can do to improve quality. This eliminates the possibility of skype doing NAT traversal in some way that results in poor quality of service.

    If I wanted more reliable VOIP I would probably look for some software that was split into a server/client app so that you would be able to run the server app on one of your personal machines and have everyone call in to that server. That would give you control over what codec and bitrate was used. however, I’m really not sure what VOIP software out there actually fits that client/server model. I ran a teamspeak server back in the day, it was good for gaming, not sure if it would really fit the bill for your needs.

    The truth is that if your looking for reliability, VOIP just isn’t that great. Data flow on the internet is very dynamic and guaranteeing latency and reliability is very difficult.

    If you want near absolute reliability, using old proven technology is probably your best bet in most cases.

    http://www.podcastpickle.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=11853

    Yeah the call quality isn’t great over your old analog phone lines, but they sure are reliable, and if your going to record both ends of the call digitally on your respective computers the podcast should sound the same. The real problem with the phone lines is dealing with conference calls.

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