Show HN: Awesometalk – Free video calling without the hassle
awesometalk.com
awesometalk.com
Apple actually is refusing to add WebRTC to Safari, because if you have good HTML5 support and WebRTC, you can do much more outside of a native app, which hurts their ability to control the app ecosystem, and helps developers ship to Android and iOS on the same day. I hope this changes, but right now it doesn't seem promising.
Two immediate requests:
1) Screen sharing
2) Group chats
Definitely loving that there's no other software or installations required. Looking forward to its further development.
(Edit: Already got an email from the developers, and I understand the security limitations of easy screen sharing, so I guess just do what is possible; I'm not asking for the impossible. Just easier than installing some full-blown software, if possible, would be great.)
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.
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.
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.
Sure.
As it happens, for the past few days I've been trying out a lot of tools for online video/audio conferencing, and made a summary of their features here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1C1gAWPBmAWsQEo78ysds... (I didn't include Awesometalk because I'm only looking for group meeting tools, not one-to-one video chat)