Skype Journal: The Ultimate Skype Video Experience Part 3 ─ Measuring Bandwidth
July 19, 2005 03:42 PM
Last night Michael and I shared "an ultimate Skype video experience." He was on his laptop; in a hotel; a 1000 miles from home. A Yank in the land of "eh?" (Canada.) He is on a consulting gig and staying at The Calgary Marriott. Michael was speechless. You've got to know Michael to know just how big an event this must have been. (grin)
Michael contacted me as soon as he arrived in the Calgary to set up a time to test Spontania’s new Video4IM beta. He had previously tested the earlier release and was disappointed. Not only is he a talker, Michael is a serious tester of anything that will play video with Skype; even some that don’t. I covered his passion in a previous Skype Journal story.
To Michael, the measure of an 'ultimate Skype video experience' is: "can his daughter and ex-wife make it work?" "Can I see my daughter's missing tooth?" High frame rate, good colour rendition, high resolution; "well those are just nice to haves." During our test Michael got it all. One click and we were connected with voice and video.
Everyone measures the elements of an "ultimate Skype video experience" with different weights. The purpose of this series of articles is to discuss these elements and help you best manage those elements so you don’t have to give up your "nice to haves." To leave you speechless.
Most video applications suck up a lot of your Internet bandwidth. In fact most video applications are bandwidth hogs. The more animated you are the more bandwidth you consume and the more pixilated or blurry you will appear to your viewer. To get the most out of your video app you will want to know:
- How to measure bandwidth
- How much bandwidth you have
- How much bandwidth your applications are consuming
The ultimate Skype Video experience requires a broadband connection. Most home broadband Internet connections are asymmetrical. This is a legacy idea from the dark ages of the Internet when most users were concerned about maximizing download speeds and greedy ISP with maximizing revenue. Thus many users have 128 kilobits/second (Kbs) upload and 256 download speeds. An upload speed of 128 Kbs may result in adequate or even good performance, but not the ultimate video performance. If you have 128 kbs of upload speed you will be using about 32 kbs for voice. That leaves a measly 96 kbs for video. Less actually, because nothing ever works at 100 percent and some bandwidth is always used for some housekeeping duties.
If you can afford to stay in the Calgary Marriott you can probably afford to buy the Internet if you could only find out who owns it. This Marriott provides a suburb in-room wired connection. We were both uploading 160 kbs for video and 32 kbs for a total of 192 kbs. Not only did Michael get his one click, "mom can use it simplicity," but the high bandwidth allowed us to move our heads from side to side about once per second and not get pixilation or a blurred image. And Michael noted that I have all my teeth.
I measure the bandwidth consumed by any application using NetPeeker. It is a shareware product available from www.net-peeker.com (if you miss the dash between ‘net’ and ‘peeker’ you will end up at a porn site).
I love this product. Been using it for over 18 months. Sent them my $25 two-days after I first downloaded it. A word of caution, keep your life simple turn off all the options. Just say no to firewalls, popup killers, and bandwidth throttles.
This screenshot shows my Skype Audio bandwidth during a test call. My upload bandwidth is shown as about 4 kilobytes per second or 32 kilobits per second (1 byte = 8 bits). If I was in call with Spontania’s Video4IM the product name will be listed alphabetically along with the corresponding upload and download bandwidth.
To find out your upload bandwidth visit my favourite measuring hole, PCPitstop.
Maybe you looked at your bandwidth as you read this story and I've left you kind of depressed. Don't be. Video apps are getting more sophisticated with each month that passes. Developers are using better bandwidth managing techniques, better codecs are emerging to compress more picture into a smaller bandwidth and users are getting smarter in managing lighting and buying better webcams. So the picture is getting brighter.
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Comments (3)
I don't know what happened, but the "one click" set-up didn't function between myself and my Brazilian brother-in-law who is "UN blue helmet" in Haiti!
I was at home using my "old" Intel CS110 Webcam and already with Spontania 0.8.5 installed; he installed Spontania while talking.
In my image preview I saw twice my picture (yes .... in the same small screen) but we could not connect!
The next day i checked it between two other computers (DirectX installed) and i had the same problem.
Definitely a Webcam problem i guess, although it worked with the 0.8.3 version!
Posted by: Jean Mercier at July 19, 2005 11:57 PM
www.testyourvoip.com is perhaps the best bandwidth tester -- it measures the most of the paraneters and it even computes a MOS (Mean Opinion Score) for VoIP
Posted by: Petr Nachtmann at July 27, 2005 2:49 AM
The ultimate Skype video experience is when I can video skype someone from my OS X box.
Posted by: Joseph at November 19, 2005 10:24 PM