Videoconference: Test and comparison of 7 programs

Whether you are on holidays, or simply far away from loved ones, it is always a nice feeling to be able to stay in contact with them, or even just to meet new people. Dedicated video conferencing programs have been designed for just this, on the condition that you have a quality internet connection, which means high speed, so that the sound and video sample rate allows for a picture in window, or even better, full screen!

In this article, which is without pretension, our objective is simple: “What are the specialised programs that are easy to configure and allow a video conference with two or more participants?” In our selection, seven programs have caught our attention as they allow you to exchange quality video with your friends, or even those that you don’t know through chat rooms. In this group, there are both free and commercial products on offer, with some of the services being only for home use, while others even offer intranet webcam chats which means on your local area network (small/medium sized companies who are working together on a project…)

All addition functions that are outside of our selection criteria are also welcome. This is the case for the recording of video messages, which now allows you to leave offline messages like that we have already seen with most instant messenger clients. A few applications in this article also support instant messaging, which means as well as the audio and video communication protocols on IP, the other standard protocols for Instant Messaging like Yahoo!, Windows Live Messenger and AIM are present.