Anyone use Facetime often?

[Pliablemoose]

Was using Skype with family tonight, and decided to hook up Facetime, it was a much better experience, no freezing video, no lost audio, occasionally the video was a little fuzzy, but it was pretty awesome...

 

[Red Storm]

Speaking of FaceTime, can you not make it go full screen? The promotional screens I saw it for showed full screen shots on macbook pros, but I'm not seeing that option on mine...

 

[midwestfisherman]

I use facetime on my iPod Touch at least twice a week to talk to my daughter. It works great.

 

[TheStu]

CMD+Shift+F is supposed to be the trigger

 

[Red Storm]

CMD+Shift+F is supposed to be the trigger

Yeah I tried that, no luck. Also, is there a command to hide the contact list? Takes up almost half the picture...

 

[Emulex]

i use it about 4-20 hours a week to talk a friend. best part of jailbreaking is 3g unrestrictor which lets you facetime over 3G.

all macbooks with snow leopard or lion can facetime, if you have a mac pro you can buy a cheap firewire sony TRV camcorder (tape drive can be faulty) and use firewire. This will give you image quality that smokes anything out there (plus night vision). the firewire models (very old like TRV-10) are the ones that work. the Carl-Zeiss optics decimate the Facetime HD in the newest macbook/imac since the optic sensor and "glass" is so poor quality.

there is an app that let's you setup a phone # on OSX to auto-answer if you want to check in on your house etc.

good stuff. my kid facetimes her buddies (4 almost 5) all the time and family.

Facetime is unique - it's like audio stream + mjpeg - so if a quality image can't be received it keeps the last known good image. Unlike all the "video codec" based designs which macroblock and look terrible (plus sound dropout) i'd rather has 2 frames a second of perfect video and perfect audio - rather than disconnect and severe macroblocking while i'm (riding) down the freeway using facetime over 3G.

Seems like someone else might think of a way to do the same. QOS audio to 100% priority and buffer it well, transmit jpeg images back to back (varying quality) - if the image is received it's displayed, if not, ditch it, framerate is irrelevant (5-10fps works great) but nobody wants to see huge macroblocks as the bitrate drops to 128kbps or less.

Anyways - love it - facetime rocks on all the osx products and ios products but i think they need to optimize the osx product as it tends to chew up tons of cpu and it can't be that hard to implement. Christ video chat has been around for ages on pc and it doesn't tear up the cpu like facetime does.

 

[foghorn67]

Facetime rocks provided you are talking with iOS users. Sucks if they don't have it.
All my friends in Europe don't use Apple. Skype is huge over there. I mean really big. Just about everyone has it installed on as many devices as possible.

Now, what I did was convinced a few to install Tango, which is way more fluid and reliable.

 

[Kaido]

Facetime rocks provided you are talking with iOS users. Sucks if they don't have it.
All my friends in Europe don't use Apple. Skype is huge over there. I mean really big. Just about everyone has it installed on as many devices as possible

Yeah, that's the problem - Facetime is only for Apple, whereas EVERYONE has Skype - even my grandma has Skype!

 

[Narse]

Speaking of FaceTime, can you not make it go full screen? The promotional screens I saw it for showed full screen shots on macbook pros, but I'm not seeing that option on mine...

I have a button at the bottom near the end button that makes it full-screen. Looks like two arrows pointing away from each other. I had that button on both snow leopard and lion.

 

[TheStu]

Yeah, that's the problem - Facetime is only for Apple, whereas EVERYONE has Skype - even my grandma has Skype!

Skype doesn't support multi-person vid chat at least not for free. Google+ is a little wonky, and I can't figure out how to get the Facebook multi-chat to work.

 

[HaukSwe]

Bought a touch for my family and we FaceTime between sweden and china all the time, works better than Skype.

 

[Emulex]

everyone has apple. hella grandma has a zune,ipad,ipod,iphone lol.

sorry nothing works better than facetime. skype looks like poo when the bandwidth is changing rapidly - the phone doesn't have enough horsepower to adapt quickly enough.

(i'm talking phone to phone, not phone to pc).

They didn't give you chess full screen either even thought it is part of lion spec lol

 

[MotionMan]

I do not use it often at all. Then again, I don't like talking to people anyway MY 12 year old nephew will FaceTime me from his Touch for fun every so often.

To video chat with my parents, we usually end up using iChat Video on our Macs. Why have they not merged FaceTime and iChat Video in some way?

MotionMan

 

[Rottie]

I do not have a Facetime I have a Powerbook with iSight it works well with iChat. Will I be able to chat with my friends with FaceTime?

 

[phillyTIM]

Yeah most all my family has some sort of recent Apple device that uses FaceTime, and I just got a MBPro and am experiencing the awesomeness that is FaceTime (HD, even!)! Tried Skype, which is alright for those without FaceTime, but make no mistake: FaceTime blows Skype right out of the water for transmission quality!