See and speak: a guide to making video calls

By Ian Grayson on 14 March 2008

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User name: canberra_photographer

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Comments: Good, but a couple of things,
Most services require at least 512kb/s connection for video. Some can go down to 256kb/s. None support dial up as there's no ability to buffer real time two way video really. This is not made clear in the article, which merely recommends a fast connection.
Also, that thing about motion in the video is just wrong. The amount of data is dependent on the bitrate. Video communications services I use have always used Constant Bitrate in which case the data remains the same. For your suggestion to work, keeping movement to a minimum, you would need to use variable bitrate which I do not believe is supported by video messaging clients. DVDs use Variable bitrate, hence action scenes can be around 8000kb/s while credits drop to 3000. The same has not being true for online streaming video of any description which more often than not uses constant bitrate.

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