Hey there, I just tried it and my experience was not very satisfactory. I imagine you are interested on the feedback so there it goes: video quality was low (super choppy, video was getting frozen at several points), voice quality was low (I could understand about 50% of what was said) and when a third person tried to join it got a message "This call is full right now" (which I don't know if it's a bug or by design - it's not clear if this is just a 1-to-1 service).
Anyways, the concept is very cool and I hope you get to make it work. A reliable service like this would remove a lot of my communication headaches.
Thanks for the feedback, sorry your first call didn't go well.
When the connection is poor, as it sounds like it was in this case, would you be okay if we fell back to audio-only and explained why? This seems like a better experience than trying to fight through lag, but we want to be careful not to arbitrarily cut off your video feed.
In Skype I have the option to show call technical info turned on.
It is immensely helpful since it shows continually updated values for latency, packet loss (in both directions), codec in use, bitrates etc. From that I can easily tell what the issues are (latency spikes vs packet loss are hard to distinguish due to the same symptoms).
That isn't helpful for the masses, but you can display some sort of connection quality indicator. You can also offer suggestions on seeing latency spikes or packet loss (try to work out of they are upstream or downstream).
The usual solution to video is to reduce bitrate, resolution and framerate. Blocky video that is taking seconds to update is an obvious indicator of connection quality issues.
Thanks Roger -- we really want to create a connection quality indicator like you describe, kind of like the number of bars on your cell connection.
One of our biggest frustrations with existing services is that it's hard to tell why the call quality is poor - is it my connection, your connection, or the service's fault?
Can I shoot you an email when we get a beta version of that indicator working? I'd love to get your feedback on it.
We are collecting anonymous data about the network, browser, etc. and tying it back to core metrics like call length, but there's always more we can do. I'm really hoping that more browsers start to support the network information API natively too: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAPI/Network_Info...
