appear.in, a video conferencing tool that uses WebRTC (in-browser media compression and streaming), honestly has pretty bad sound and picture quality compared to Skype.
I tried using an appear.in room to stream my webcam back home on demand, but it sucked, so I made an extra Skype account instead and had my roommate log into it and enable auto-answer on it.
Risky? Nah. Nothing interesting happens in the living room when I'm not there. I just want to check on my cat from time to time.
@thor It's got noticeably worse on the free accounts since they started pushing premium.
As a premium subscriber, appear.in is great, but the best quality I've experienced is through Zoom (company I'm working for has accounts)
@dajbelshaw They lower the bitrate? Doesn't sound like a good sales strategy. When I talk about quality, and mention WebRTC explicitly, it's because I'm not only talking about the bitrate, but the quality of the noise filtering and echo cancellation, which is an issue with how WebRTC is implemented, not appear.in as such. The noise filter is too aggressive, and the echo cancellation is leaky. Skype seems to have much better algorithms.
@dajbelshaw When it comes to noise filtering in particular, I have yet to actually encounter a system that does a good job of it. Yes, the noise is filtered out, but so is half the speech information, and you end up with mushy audio and quiet sections of speech being filtered out. I always disable noise filtering if there's an option to do it. Skype doesn't seem to do any noticeable noise filtering, only very good echo cancellation, and that's the way I like it.
@thor I dislike Skype for many, many reasons, the least of which is that it's owned by Microsoft.
I'm happy to support appear.in as it's a woman-owned Nordic startup that's found a sustainable business model 👍
@dajbelshaw I have never used or bought anything for political reasons. If I like it, I use it. I have *quit* using things for political reasons, however.
I would eliminate Skype completely if something equally good existed and I didn't need Skype specifically for work. I'm not willing to pay for a video conferencing system unless I can turn a profit on it as a business investment.
@dajbelshaw In my case, it was used by my former workplace for remote workers to participate in meetings. I'm quite sure that won't be my last use of Skype.
Again, if I was using it to make money as a consultant, I could justify it easily. I actually hope I can do that some day. I'm technically a consultant/contractor but I'm not having a great deal of luck with it so far.
@thor Cool. Each to their own. I like funding things that I want to see more of in the world.
Appear.in for me in a consultancy role is awesome as I don't have to assume that a client has anything installed 👍