>
> Of course, none of these multi-platform alternatives is as "shiny, shiny" as
> Skype. And Skype isn't anywhere remotely as "shiny, shiny" as Facetime.
>
> Give it a few months, and I'm sure you'll start to see Facetime clients pop
> up on other OSes -- helping make that happen through "real deal" Internet
> standards-based standards is more to the benefit of Apple than any
> proprietary alternative, and helps them avoid the Microsoft/Google/Skype
> Hegemony.
background: I have never used skype nor facetime.
Wikipedia says (about facetime):
FaceTime is based on numerous technologies:
* H.264 and AAC – video and audio codecs respectively
* SIP – IETF signaling protocol for VoIP
* STUN, TURN and ICE – IETF technologies for traversing firewalls and NAT
* RTP and SRTP – IETF standards for delivering real-time and encrypted
media streams for VoIP
If I read this right, chances are that factime is "just" a very good client to
standard protocols (and yes some libraries will do a better job at
encoding/decoding H264), which would mean that:
-you can always use facetime to talk to other program on other platform, or
even a physical SIP phone, so not in a few months, but today
-my understanding is that skype is three things:
-a very good client
-a very good proprietary protocol (as in, better than the standard one)
-they pool network connections to get more bandwidth
I don't know of any standard protocol which steals^H^H^H^H^H^H use your
neighbour's bandwidth to improve your connection, so unless facetime does
something tricky like this, or also use a proprietary protocol (in addition to
the standard ones) that's even better than skype's, I wonder how they can be
that much better.
--
Yves. http://www.SollerS.ca/
http://images.SollerS.ca/
xmpp:y...@zioup.com
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