![]() What makes this service different from similar video chatting services such as Apple’s FaceTime for example is that calls can be recorded in real-time and it supports twelve-way video chatting. Otherwise, actually carrying on a useful conversation is likely to be very difficult.OoVoo is a video chat and instant messaging client which is currently avaialable for Android, iOS, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X. The fastest of the three was a Pentium 3.0 GHz, and it had no trouble at all keeping up, so I will say again, if you are thinking of using ooVoo for video conferencing with more than two participants, make sure that each of the participants has the processing power and the bandwidth to support it. The slowest of the three, a Pentium-M 1.6 GHz, could barely keep up in fact the lag to and from that system was so bad that I could get up from the room where that one was located and walk to the next room, sit down and then watch myself get up and walk away on the video coming from that PC - and then get up and walk back to the slow system, sit down and watch myself walk back into the room! Now, a 1.6 GHz Pentium isn't a great system, but it's not chopped liver, either, so this seems like pretty extreme lag to me. The funny part, though, was when I tried a three-way video call, with three PCs in different rooms. When I was talking to my brother, who is on the other side of the world and has a rather low speed ADSL connection, the lag was very noticeable, and actually got so bad that it made carrying on a conversation pretty difficult. It seemed that there was always a noticeable "lag" in the video, even when I was connecting between two PCs that were sitting side by side on my desk. I was rather disappointed in the overall audio/video performance of ooVoo. ![]() I'm still undecided on this feature, because it seems rather trivial to me, but whenever I turn it off, I am surprised at how "flat" the video looks. It does make for a bit more "fancy" appearance, but turning it off actually allows the video windows to be a bit larger inside the Video Conversation window. ![]() ![]() Of course, with the video resolution ooVoo is sending right now I probably wouldn't want to see the video full screen anyway, but that is likely to change.īy default, ooVoo shows the video windows in "3D mode", which simply means that the incoming and outgoing video windows appear to be slightly angled to each other. Even if you click "enlarge video window" on the incoming video, and then expand the enclosing Video Conversation window to full screen, the actual incoming video is still considerably less than the size of the entire display. I also couldn't find a way to have ooVoo show only the incoming video on the full screen. I could do it indirectly, by telling it to enlarge the incoming video window, so it fills the Video Conversation window, but what I was after was just the opposite - remove the outgoing preview, and then make the Video Conversation window that much smaller. I couldn't find a way to tell ooVoo to remove the outgoing video preview. However, there were a few things about the video display that I thought were missing. I thought it was very nice, and a bit surprising, that if you resized the "Video Conversation" window, both of the windows within it were proportionally resized as well. The "Video Conversation" window shows both your outgoing video and the incoming video in equal sized windows. There are also buttons to send a file, send a text chat message, terminate the call, take a snapshot or invite other contacts to join the video conversation. There are very obvious buttons to stop the camera or mute the microphone or speakers, and drop-down menus to select from different devices for any of these. When you are in a video call, the controls are once again nice and clear and simple. I spent quite a while searching their web page, FAQs and User Forums for information on this, but couldn't find anything. On my test systems it looks like 320x240 and certainly not more than 15 FPS, probably less - it is very prone to smearing and ghosting. ![]() There is no "technical data" or "debug info" available that I can find, so I can't be sure what video resolution and frame rate it sends. Next, of course, the worst things about ooVoo: But that is a big IF - it takes a LOT of bandwidth, and a LOT of processing power for every additional participant in a video call. If you've got the bandwidth and processing power to handle it, and you need or want this capability, this can be the "killer" reason to go with ooVoo. The six-way video conference capability is amazing. Buttons are large and colorful, and the graphics on them and pop-up tips for them make it very obvious what they are for. The appearance, "look and feel", "user interface", however you want to term it, is very pleasant, and also quite simple. ![]()
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