On 4/20/10 6:38 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Tue, 20 Apr 2010, John R. Levine wrote:
Skype video chat, all the time, works fine. Don't remember about
file transfer.
Whenever I am behind NAT and talk to someone else who is behind NAT
skype seems to lower the quality, my guess it's because it now bounces
traffic via another non-NATed node.
These kind of applications work best if there is at least one
non-NATed party involved, especially for video etc.
My own experience is that skype quality lags that of iChat A/V, but I
had always attributed that to iChat having better codecs. I could be
wrong. iChat A/V, on the other hand, seems to have a heart attack when
both sides have private addresses, and the firewall configuration is
non-trivial.
But I think we're going about this the wrong way. I wonder if we could
change the way we do business in the longer term if everyone had public
address space. As an application guy, I dislike the fact that people
have to rely on some sort of service to share their calendars. That
makes great sense for the service provider, and it even makes sense for
the consumer right now due to the state of the art. But perhaps the
times could change.
There are lots of use cases where connecting into the house would be
nice. Baby monitoring, security monitoring, Smart this, smart that,
etc. Instead we require extra middleware to make it all work. The
economics are, if nothing else, a painful lesson.
Eliot
