Group Movie Talk Showdown: Google Hangouts and AnyMeeting Come Out on Top, PCWorld
Group Movie Talk Showdown: Google Hangouts and AnyMeeting Come Out on Top
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PCWorld | Nov 7, two thousand eleven 6:00 PM PT
Everyone wants to be in on the conversation, but sometimes distance can make in-person meetings hard. We tested five multiperson movie talk services–Google Hangouts, Skype Premium, Tinychat, AV by AIM, and AnyMeeting–to find the best place to conduct a group meeting online.
A lot of variables can affect the spectacle of a movie talk service, from the available bandwidth to the quality of the participants’ webcams. In our lab tests, we set up five computers to movie talk with one another: two desktop PCs, two Windows laptops, and a MacBook. We provided ethernet connections for the desktops and wireless Internet connections for the laptops. We also looked at how effortless it was to set up and use each service, and considered whether each service had any extra features (such as text talk or movie muffling) to enhance movie talk.
Here’s what we found.
Google Hangouts
Setup: To use Google Hangouts you need a Google account (with a Google+ profile). You also have to install a browser plug-in, which works with Windows XP or higher, Mac OS X Ten.Five or higher, or Linux. You can commence a hangout from your Google+ page by clicking a button on the right side of the screen that says ‘Begin a Hangout!’ This activity takes you to a test page, where Google starts your webcam and microphone, but no one else can see your movie broadcast.
Before you inject a hangout, Google permits you to preview what you’ll look and sound like to other members of the hangout. In the test page is a box that permits you to choose which “circles” (or groups of friends) to inform about your hangout. Once you embark the hangout, everyone in those circles will be able to see that, and they can join your hangout if they want.
When you’re ready, click the ‘String up out’ button from the test page to go to the movie talk room. You can invite more people by typing their Gmail addresses in the bar on the left side.
You can invite up to ten people to movie talk.
Movie interface and quality: While you’re in a hangout, whoever has the superior voice will come in the large main movie window, and all the other movie broadcasts will show up in smaller movie stream windows at the bottom. This arrangement, of course, assumes that every hangout will remain civil. If two people speak at the same time, with almost equal tone and volume, Google Hangouts still chooses one to be front and center in the talk. Regardless, members of the hangout can by hand adjust the layout by clicking on any of the smaller movie broadcasts to see that stream in the largest window instead.
Also, with five or more people in the same hangout, the movie streaming can stall, and sometimes it has trouble resolving. Voices can become temporarily garbled on occasion, but overall the movie quality and sound quality are both very good.
Extra features: Google Hangouts offers several features in the videoconferencing window besides just movie. One large button underneath the movie windows permits you to send text talks to the entire group during the hangout. Unless you tell people you’re going to send text, however, the Hangouts window gives no indication that a member of the group is sending written messages–each participant has to click the Talk button on their own initiative to read any messages that group members might have written.
You can observe YouTube movies while you’re in a hangout. One indeed cool feature: A YouTube button in the bottom toolbar permits you to search for movies that you can then observe in the main screen within Google Hangouts. Since Hangouts automatically mutes your mic during playback, no one else can hear you over the YouTube video’s sound; a ‘Shove to Talk’ button lowers the video’s sound and turns on your mic if you need to interject in the hangout conversation before the movie is over.
Bottom line: Google Hangouts is a excellent way to gather a puny crowd to movie chat–as long as everyone has a Google account. If you’re on a laptop, you may want to use it only for brief talks, as smaller computers can lightly overheat after running Hangouts for a long time.
Skype Premium
Setup: To commence a multiperson movie talk on Skype, you must have a Skype Premium membership, which costs $9 a month (or you can buy a Skype Premium day pass for $Five). Once a Premium user has set up the videoconference, he or she can add any Skype members to the movie talk, whether those people use the free service or the Premium service. If the Skype Premium member logs out of the group talk, the session completes for all participants.
Both the free and Premium versions of Skype require that you register with the company and download its software and talk sidebar, so it isn’t a good option if you need to organize a videoconference with a group quickly (unless you know that everyone in the group has Skype). Once you’ve signed up, you can find friends via Facebook, Gmail, or Hotmail, or search by Skype screen name. Skype Premium permits videoconferencing with up to twenty four people.
Skype is a popular service, and if you’ve had it for a long time (as I have), you might need to update the software on your computer to get multiparty movie talk to work (I had to update from version Two.8.0.866 to version Five.Trio.0.1093). Fortunately, doing so is effortless: Just go to Skype in the toolbar, click Check for updates, and go after the directions. The latest version is much slicker, with fewer windows that clutter your screen.
Movie interface and quality: In general, Skype’s movie and sound quality were very good in our tests. The movie was on a par with that of Google Hangouts–generally accurate, with only a little latency inbetween what a webcam was broadcasting and what everyone else could see on the screen. Sometimes, however, a movie stream would freeze for about half a minute before resolving, a problem that grew worse the longer the conference continued. The sound quality was better than the audio in Google Hangouts, but only slightly.
The more people who join the call, the smaller the movie boxes get, but you can click on individual movie boxes to increase them.
The top picture is a screenshot from Skype, where the photo on the left was from a MacBook’s built-in iSight webcam and the picture on the right was from an HD webcam. The bottom pic is a screenshot of Google Hangouts; the large center photo came from the same MacBook iSight camera. The quality of each individual webcam seemed exaggerated on Skype Premium in comparison with Google Hangouts. In one test, I hooked up two desktops with 720p HD webcams and one MacBook with a built-in iSight webcam (which has always given me a pretty clear photo), and the contrast inbetween Skype’s resolution for the iSight and for the HD webcams was startling. Connecting the same three webcams in Google Hangouts did not result in such a dramatic difference, and the feed from the iSight was much clearer there.
Extra features: Skype has several useful extras built into its group movie talk service. Members of the group movie talk can send text messages in the talk box underneath the movie window; when a member types something, other participants see a petite crimson circle on the talk icon that indicates a text talk has begun. You can also send messages via SMS during the group movie talk, but you must purchase Skype credits for that service.
In addition, Skype lets you send files (pictures, screenshots, MP3s) to the other people involved in your talk, through the main window. Thanks to this convenient feature, you don’t have to navigate to your browser or email client to send files to the group.
Bottom line: Videoconferencing with Skype Premium costs money, and requires more setup than most other movie talk services do. The voice quality is the best among the services we tested, but the movie quality is no better than that of the (free) Google Hangouts service.
Tinychat
Setup: Tinychat is a browser-based movie talk service, so you have nothing to download. You can quickly commence your own talk room (or, if you’re feeling lonely, you can inject any one of the many public movie talk rooms the site hosts). Tinychat is free, but annoying banner ads surround the talk interface.
Tinychat is free, but all the ads around the movie talk window can be distracting. Once you determine to set up your own talk room, Tinychat walks you through several windows to help you select a webcam and a mic, and it asks you to choose either an open mic or a ‘Shove to talk’ button that will mute your mic until you click and hold the button down.
Inviting other people to join the movie talk is effortless. Once you’ve began a talk room, go to the Share button on top of the movie, and Tinychat will generate a URL that you can then send to others. Everyone else joining your Tinychat group needs to sign in through Facebook, sign in via Twitter, or come in anonymously as a guest. Fresh guests will be able to see the movie broadcasts that are already happening; to add their own movie to the talk room, however, guests must click ‘Embark Broadcasting’, after which a pop-up shows up requesting access to their webcam and mic.
Movie interface and quality: In Tinychat you can share only up to twelve broadcasts, but you can have an unlimited number of viewers.
Albeit the movie quality on Tinychat is pretty good, the sound quality is pathetic. I heard a noisy humming in the background when any noise was present on the microphone. Voices sounded louder and slightly contorted compared with voices on Hangouts and Skype, even after we made several adjustments to the microphones. And when the noise from all of the microphones was soft enough, the sound would just cut out for a minute, leaving me wondering if my headphones had malfunctioned.
In the lab test, I also experienced a Two.7-second delay on sound and movie, which was a little annoying. Sometimes, after running for more than fifteen minutes, the movie will stall, and you may have to refresh your browser to begin the movie again.
Extra features: One of the coolest things about Tinychat is the EtherPad Lite function (which you can begin by clicking the paper icon under the movie box), a word-processing box in which all members of the talk group can write, permitting collaboration on documents. Each member is assigned a pastel color, so you can see who wrote what during the movie talk.
Bottom line: Tinychat may be a good choice if you need to gather a lot of people in a movie talk room quickly. It has no real setup, and you invite other members simply by sharing a URL. It’s especially fine if you’re working on a project that requires more writing than talking (such as in explore groups or project planning) and you just want the movie available so that you can ask quick questions. It could be pretty useful for a family-wide game of charades, too. But if you want to have a long discussion with the rest of your group, Tinychat is not your best option.
Group Movie Talk Showdown: Google Hangouts and AnyMeeting Come Out on Top, PCWorld
Group Movie Talk Showdown: Google Hangouts and AnyMeeting Come Out on Top
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There was an error emailing this page.
PCWorld | Nov 7, two thousand eleven 6:00 PM PT
Everyone wants to be in on the conversation, but sometimes distance can make in-person meetings hard. We tested five multiperson movie talk services–Google Hangouts, Skype Premium, Tinychat, AV by AIM, and AnyMeeting–to find the best place to conduct a group meeting online.
A lot of variables can affect the spectacle of a movie talk service, from the available bandwidth to the quality of the participants’ webcams. In our lab tests, we set up five computers to movie talk with one another: two desktop PCs, two Windows laptops, and a MacBook. We provided ethernet connections for the desktops and wireless Internet connections for the laptops. We also looked at how effortless it was to set up and use each service, and considered whether each service had any extra features (such as text talk or movie muffling) to enhance movie talk.
Here’s what we found.
Google Hangouts
Setup: To use Google Hangouts you need a Google account (with a Google+ profile). You also have to install a browser plug-in, which works with Windows XP or higher, Mac OS X Ten.Five or higher, or Linux. You can commence a hangout from your Google+ page by clicking a button on the right side of the screen that says ‘Commence a Hangout!’ This act takes you to a test page, where Google starts your webcam and microphone, but no one else can see your movie broadcast.
Before you come in a hangout, Google permits you to preview what you’ll look and sound like to other members of the hangout. In the test page is a box that permits you to choose which “circles” (or groups of friends) to inform about your hangout. Once you commence the hangout, everyone in those circles will be able to see that, and they can join your hangout if they want.
When you’re ready, click the ‘Suspend out’ button from the test page to go to the movie talk room. You can invite more people by typing their Gmail addresses in the bar on the left side.
You can invite up to ten people to movie talk.
Movie interface and quality: While you’re in a hangout, whoever has the superior voice will come in the large main movie window, and all the other movie broadcasts will emerge in smaller movie stream windows at the bottom. This arrangement, of course, assumes that every hangout will remain civil. If two people speak at the same time, with almost equal tone and volume, Google Hangouts still chooses one to be front and center in the talk. Regardless, members of the hangout can by hand adjust the layout by clicking on any of the smaller movie broadcasts to see that stream in the largest window instead.
Also, with five or more people in the same hangout, the movie streaming can stall, and sometimes it has trouble resolving. Voices can become temporarily garbled on occasion, but overall the movie quality and sound quality are both very good.
Extra features: Google Hangouts offers several features in the videoconferencing window besides just movie. One large button underneath the movie windows permits you to send text talks to the entire group during the hangout. Unless you tell people you’re going to send text, however, the Hangouts window gives no indication that a member of the group is sending written messages–each participant has to click the Talk button on their own initiative to read any messages that group members might have written.
You can see YouTube movies while you’re in a hangout. One indeed cool feature: A YouTube button in the bottom toolbar permits you to search for movies that you can then witness in the main screen within Google Hangouts. Since Hangouts automatically mutes your mic during playback, no one else can hear you over the YouTube video’s sound; a ‘Shove to Talk’ button lowers the video’s sound and turns on your mic if you need to interject in the hangout conversation before the movie is over.
Bottom line: Google Hangouts is a good way to gather a puny crowd to movie chat–as long as everyone has a Google account. If you’re on a laptop, you may want to use it only for brief talks, as smaller computers can lightly overheat after running Hangouts for a long time.
Skype Premium
Setup: To embark a multiperson movie talk on Skype, you must have a Skype Premium membership, which costs $9 a month (or you can buy a Skype Premium day pass for $Five). Once a Premium user has set up the videoconference, he or she can add any Skype members to the movie talk, whether those people use the free service or the Premium service. If the Skype Premium member logs out of the group talk, the session completes for all participants.
Both the free and Premium versions of Skype require that you register with the company and download its software and talk sidebar, so it isn’t a good option if you need to organize a videoconference with a group quickly (unless you know that everyone in the group has Skype). Once you’ve signed up, you can find friends via Facebook, Gmail, or Hotmail, or search by Skype screen name. Skype Premium permits videoconferencing with up to twenty four people.
Skype is a popular service, and if you’ve had it for a long time (as I have), you might need to update the software on your computer to get multiparty movie talk to work (I had to update from version Two.8.0.866 to version Five.Trio.0.1093). Fortunately, doing so is effortless: Just go to Skype in the toolbar, click Check for updates, and go after the directions. The latest version is much slicker, with fewer windows that clutter your screen.
Movie interface and quality: In general, Skype’s movie and sound quality were very good in our tests. The movie was on a par with that of Google Hangouts–generally accurate, with only a little latency inbetween what a webcam was broadcasting and what everyone else could see on the screen. Sometimes, however, a movie stream would freeze for about half a minute before resolving, a problem that grew worse the longer the conference continued. The sound quality was better than the audio in Google Hangouts, but only slightly.
The more people who join the call, the smaller the movie boxes get, but you can click on individual movie boxes to enhance them.
The top photo is a screenshot from Skype, where the pic on the left was from a MacBook’s built-in iSight webcam and the photo on the right was from an HD webcam. The bottom photo is a screenshot of Google Hangouts; the large center pic came from the same MacBook iSight camera. The quality of each individual webcam seemed exaggerated on Skype Premium in comparison with Google Hangouts. In one test, I hooked up two desktops with 720p HD webcams and one MacBook with a built-in iSight webcam (which has always given me a pretty clear photo), and the contrast inbetween Skype’s resolution for the iSight and for the HD webcams was startling. Connecting the same three webcams in Google Hangouts did not result in such a dramatic difference, and the feed from the iSight was much clearer there.
Extra features: Skype has several useful extras built into its group movie talk service. Members of the group movie talk can send text messages in the talk box underneath the movie window; when a member types something, other participants see a petite crimson circle on the talk icon that indicates a text talk has begun. You can also send messages via SMS during the group movie talk, but you must purchase Skype credits for that service.
In addition, Skype lets you send files (pictures, screenshots, MP3s) to the other people involved in your talk, through the main window. Thanks to this convenient feature, you don’t have to navigate to your browser or email client to send files to the group.
Bottom line: Videoconferencing with Skype Premium costs money, and requires more setup than most other movie talk services do. The voice quality is the best among the services we tested, but the movie quality is no better than that of the (free) Google Hangouts service.
Tinychat
Setup: Tinychat is a browser-based movie talk service, so you have nothing to download. You can quickly begin your own talk room (or, if you’re feeling lonely, you can come in any one of the many public movie talk rooms the site hosts). Tinychat is free, but annoying banner ads surround the talk interface.
Tinychat is free, but all the ads around the movie talk window can be distracting. Once you determine to set up your own talk room, Tinychat walks you through several windows to help you select a webcam and a mic, and it asks you to choose either an open mic or a ‘Shove to talk’ button that will mute your mic until you click and hold the button down.
Inviting other people to join the movie talk is effortless. Once you’ve commenced a talk room, go to the Share button on top of the movie, and Tinychat will generate a URL that you can then send to others. Everyone else joining your Tinychat group needs to sign in through Facebook, sign in via Twitter, or come in anonymously as a guest. Fresh guests will be able to see the movie broadcasts that are already happening; to add their own movie to the talk room, however, guests must click ‘Embark Broadcasting’, after which a pop-up shows up requesting access to their webcam and mic.
Movie interface and quality: In Tinychat you can share only up to twelve broadcasts, but you can have an unlimited number of viewers.
Albeit the movie quality on Tinychat is pretty good, the sound quality is pitiful. I heard a noisy humming in the background when any noise was present on the microphone. Voices sounded louder and slightly twisted compared with voices on Hangouts and Skype, even after we made several adjustments to the microphones. And when the noise from all of the microphones was soft enough, the sound would just cut out for a minute, leaving me wondering if my headphones had malfunctioned.
In the lab test, I also experienced a Two.7-second delay on sound and movie, which was a little annoying. Sometimes, after running for more than fifteen minutes, the movie will stall, and you may have to refresh your browser to commence the movie again.
Extra features: One of the coolest things about Tinychat is the EtherPad Lite function (which you can commence by clicking the paper icon under the movie box), a word-processing box in which all members of the talk group can write, permitting collaboration on documents. Each member is assigned a pastel color, so you can see who wrote what during the movie talk.
Bottom line: Tinychat may be a good choice if you need to gather a lot of people in a movie talk room quickly. It has no real setup, and you invite other members simply by sharing a URL. It’s especially fine if you’re working on a project that requires more writing than talking (such as in probe groups or project planning) and you just want the movie available so that you can ask quick questions. It could be pretty useful for a family-wide game of charades, too. But if you want to have a long discussion with the rest of your group, Tinychat is not your best option.
Group Movie Talk Showdown: Google Hangouts and AnyMeeting Come Out on Top, PCWorld
Group Movie Talk Showdown: Google Hangouts and AnyMeeting Come Out on Top
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There was an error emailing this page.
PCWorld | Nov 7, two thousand eleven 6:00 PM PT
Everyone wants to be in on the conversation, but sometimes distance can make in-person meetings hard. We tested five multiperson movie talk services–Google Hangouts, Skype Premium, Tinychat, AV by AIM, and AnyMeeting–to find the best place to conduct a group meeting online.
A lot of variables can affect the spectacle of a movie talk service, from the available bandwidth to the quality of the participants’ webcams. In our lab tests, we set up five computers to movie talk with one another: two desktop PCs, two Windows laptops, and a MacBook. We provided ethernet connections for the desktops and wireless Internet connections for the laptops. We also looked at how effortless it was to set up and use each service, and considered whether each service had any extra features (such as text talk or movie muffling) to enhance movie talk.
Here’s what we found.
Google Hangouts
Setup: To use Google Hangouts you need a Google account (with a Google+ profile). You also have to install a browser plug-in, which works with Windows XP or higher, Mac OS X Ten.Five or higher, or Linux. You can commence a hangout from your Google+ page by clicking a button on the right side of the screen that says ‘Begin a Hangout!’ This act takes you to a test page, where Google starts your webcam and microphone, but no one else can see your movie broadcast.
Before you inject a hangout, Google permits you to preview what you’ll look and sound like to other members of the hangout. In the test page is a box that permits you to choose which “circles” (or groups of friends) to inform about your hangout. Once you commence the hangout, everyone in those circles will be able to see that, and they can join your hangout if they want.
When you’re ready, click the ‘Drape out’ button from the test page to go to the movie talk room. You can invite more people by typing their Gmail addresses in the bar on the left side.
You can invite up to ten people to movie talk.
Movie interface and quality: While you’re in a hangout, whoever has the superior voice will come in the large main movie window, and all the other movie broadcasts will emerge in smaller movie stream windows at the bottom. This arrangement, of course, assumes that every hangout will remain civil. If two people speak at the same time, with almost equal tone and volume, Google Hangouts still chooses one to be front and center in the talk. Regardless, members of the hangout can by hand adjust the layout by clicking on any of the smaller movie broadcasts to see that stream in the largest window instead.
Also, with five or more people in the same hangout, the movie streaming can stall, and sometimes it has trouble resolving. Voices can become temporarily garbled on occasion, but overall the movie quality and sound quality are both very good.
Extra features: Google Hangouts offers several features in the videoconferencing window besides just movie. One large button underneath the movie windows permits you to send text talks to the entire group during the hangout. Unless you tell people you’re going to send text, however, the Hangouts window gives no indication that a member of the group is sending written messages–each participant has to click the Talk button on their own initiative to read any messages that group members might have written.
You can observe YouTube movies while you’re in a hangout. One truly cool feature: A YouTube button in the bottom toolbar permits you to search for movies that you can then witness in the main screen within Google Hangouts. Since Hangouts automatically mutes your mic during playback, no one else can hear you over the YouTube video’s sound; a ‘Shove to Talk’ button lowers the video’s sound and turns on your mic if you need to interject in the hangout conversation before the movie is over.
Bottom line: Google Hangouts is a fine way to gather a puny crowd to movie chat–as long as everyone has a Google account. If you’re on a laptop, you may want to use it only for brief talks, as smaller computers can lightly overheat after running Hangouts for a long time.
Skype Premium
Setup: To embark a multiperson movie talk on Skype, you must have a Skype Premium membership, which costs $9 a month (or you can buy a Skype Premium day pass for $Five). Once a Premium user has set up the videoconference, he or she can add any Skype members to the movie talk, whether those people use the free service or the Premium service. If the Skype Premium member logs out of the group talk, the session finishes for all participants.
Both the free and Premium versions of Skype require that you register with the company and download its software and talk sidebar, so it isn’t a superb option if you need to organize a videoconference with a group quickly (unless you know that everyone in the group has Skype). Once you’ve signed up, you can find friends via Facebook, Gmail, or Hotmail, or search by Skype screen name. Skype Premium permits videoconferencing with up to twenty four people.
Skype is a popular service, and if you’ve had it for a long time (as I have), you might need to update the software on your computer to get multiparty movie talk to work (I had to update from version Two.8.0.866 to version Five.Three.0.1093). Fortunately, doing so is effortless: Just go to Skype in the toolbar, click Check for updates, and go after the directions. The latest version is much slicker, with fewer windows that clutter your screen.
Movie interface and quality: In general, Skype’s movie and sound quality were very good in our tests. The movie was on a par with that of Google Hangouts–generally accurate, with only a little latency inbetween what a webcam was broadcasting and what everyone else could see on the screen. Sometimes, however, a movie stream would freeze for about half a minute before resolving, a problem that grew worse the longer the conference continued. The sound quality was better than the audio in Google Hangouts, but only slightly.
The more people who join the call, the smaller the movie boxes get, but you can click on individual movie boxes to increase them.
The top photo is a screenshot from Skype, where the photo on the left was from a MacBook’s built-in iSight webcam and the pic on the right was from an HD webcam. The bottom photo is a screenshot of Google Hangouts; the large center pic came from the same MacBook iSight camera. The quality of each individual webcam seemed exaggerated on Skype Premium in comparison with Google Hangouts. In one test, I hooked up two desktops with 720p HD webcams and one MacBook with a built-in iSight webcam (which has always given me a pretty clear pic), and the contrast inbetween Skype’s resolution for the iSight and for the HD webcams was startling. Connecting the same three webcams in Google Hangouts did not result in such a dramatic difference, and the feed from the iSight was much clearer there.
Extra features: Skype has several useful extras built into its group movie talk service. Members of the group movie talk can send text messages in the talk box underneath the movie window; when a member types something, other participants see a puny crimson circle on the talk icon that indicates a text talk has begun. You can also send messages via SMS during the group movie talk, but you must purchase Skype credits for that service.
In addition, Skype lets you send files (pictures, screenshots, MP3s) to the other people involved in your talk, through the main window. Thanks to this convenient feature, you don’t have to navigate to your browser or email client to send files to the group.
Bottom line: Videoconferencing with Skype Premium costs money, and requires more setup than most other movie talk services do. The voice quality is the best among the services we tested, but the movie quality is no better than that of the (free) Google Hangouts service.
Tinychat
Setup: Tinychat is a browser-based movie talk service, so you have nothing to download. You can quickly begin your own talk room (or, if you’re feeling lonely, you can inject any one of the many public movie talk rooms the site hosts). Tinychat is free, but annoying banner ads surround the talk interface.
Tinychat is free, but all the ads around the movie talk window can be distracting. Once you determine to set up your own talk room, Tinychat walks you through several windows to help you select a webcam and a mic, and it asks you to choose either an open mic or a ‘Thrust to talk’ button that will mute your mic until you click and hold the button down.
Inviting other people to join the movie talk is effortless. Once you’ve began a talk room, go to the Share button on top of the movie, and Tinychat will generate a URL that you can then send to others. Everyone else joining your Tinychat group needs to sign in through Facebook, sign in via Twitter, or come in anonymously as a guest. Fresh guests will be able to see the movie broadcasts that are already happening; to add their own movie to the talk room, however, guests must click ‘Commence Broadcasting’, after which a pop-up shows up requesting access to their webcam and mic.
Movie interface and quality: In Tinychat you can share only up to twelve broadcasts, but you can have an unlimited number of viewers.
Albeit the movie quality on Tinychat is pretty good, the sound quality is pathetic. I heard a noisy humming in the background when any noise was present on the microphone. Voices sounded louder and slightly contorted compared with voices on Hangouts and Skype, even after we made several adjustments to the microphones. And when the noise from all of the microphones was soft enough, the sound would just cut out for a minute, leaving me wondering if my headphones had malfunctioned.
In the lab test, I also experienced a Two.7-second delay on sound and movie, which was a little annoying. Sometimes, after running for more than fifteen minutes, the movie will stall, and you may have to refresh your browser to begin the movie again.
Extra features: One of the coolest things about Tinychat is the EtherPad Lite function (which you can embark by clicking the paper icon under the movie box), a word-processing box in which all members of the talk group can write, permitting collaboration on documents. Each member is assigned a pastel color, so you can see who wrote what during the movie talk.
Bottom line: Tinychat may be a good choice if you need to gather a lot of people in a movie talk room quickly. It has no real setup, and you invite other members simply by sharing a URL. It’s especially superb if you’re working on a project that requires more writing than talking (such as in probe groups or project planning) and you just want the movie available so that you can ask quick questions. It could be pretty useful for a family-wide game of charades, too. But if you want to have a long discussion with the rest of your group, Tinychat is not your best option.
Group Movie Talk Showdown: Google Hangouts and AnyMeeting Come Out on Top, PCWorld
Group Movie Talk Showdown: Google Hangouts and AnyMeeting Come Out on Top
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There was an error emailing this page.
PCWorld | Nov 7, two thousand eleven 6:00 PM PT
Everyone wants to be in on the conversation, but sometimes distance can make in-person meetings hard. We tested five multiperson movie talk services–Google Hangouts, Skype Premium, Tinychat, AV by AIM, and AnyMeeting–to find the best place to conduct a group meeting online.
A lot of variables can affect the spectacle of a movie talk service, from the available bandwidth to the quality of the participants’ webcams. In our lab tests, we set up five computers to movie talk with one another: two desktop PCs, two Windows laptops, and a MacBook. We provided ethernet connections for the desktops and wireless Internet connections for the laptops. We also looked at how effortless it was to set up and use each service, and considered whether each service had any extra features (such as text talk or movie muffling) to enhance movie talk.
Here’s what we found.
Google Hangouts
Setup: To use Google Hangouts you need a Google account (with a Google+ profile). You also have to install a browser plug-in, which works with Windows XP or higher, Mac OS X Ten.Five or higher, or Linux. You can begin a hangout from your Google+ page by clicking a button on the right side of the screen that says ‘Embark a Hangout!’ This activity takes you to a test page, where Google starts your webcam and microphone, but no one else can see your movie broadcast.
Before you inject a hangout, Google permits you to preview what you’ll look and sound like to other members of the hangout. In the test page is a box that permits you to choose which “circles” (or groups of friends) to inform about your hangout. Once you begin the hangout, everyone in those circles will be able to see that, and they can join your hangout if they want.
When you’re ready, click the ‘Suspend out’ button from the test page to go to the movie talk room. You can invite more people by typing their Gmail addresses in the bar on the left side.
You can invite up to ten people to movie talk.
Movie interface and quality: While you’re in a hangout, whoever has the superior voice will inject the large main movie window, and all the other movie broadcasts will emerge in smaller movie stream windows at the bottom. This arrangement, of course, assumes that every hangout will remain civil. If two people speak at the same time, with almost equal tone and volume, Google Hangouts still chooses one to be front and center in the talk. Regardless, members of the hangout can by hand adjust the layout by clicking on any of the smaller movie broadcasts to see that stream in the largest window instead.
Also, with five or more people in the same hangout, the movie streaming can stall, and sometimes it has trouble resolving. Voices can become temporarily garbled on occasion, but overall the movie quality and sound quality are both very good.
Extra features: Google Hangouts offers several features in the videoconferencing window besides just movie. One large button underneath the movie windows permits you to send text talks to the entire group during the hangout. Unless you tell people you’re going to send text, however, the Hangouts window gives no indication that a member of the group is sending written messages–each participant has to click the Talk button on their own initiative to read any messages that group members might have written.
You can witness YouTube movies while you’re in a hangout. One truly cool feature: A YouTube button in the bottom toolbar permits you to search for movies that you can then witness in the main screen within Google Hangouts. Since Hangouts automatically mutes your mic during playback, no one else can hear you over the YouTube video’s sound; a ‘Thrust to Talk’ button lowers the video’s sound and turns on your mic if you need to interject in the hangout conversation before the movie is over.
Bottom line: Google Hangouts is a good way to gather a puny crowd to movie chat–as long as everyone has a Google account. If you’re on a laptop, you may want to use it only for brief talks, as smaller computers can lightly overheat after running Hangouts for a long time.
Skype Premium
Setup: To embark a multiperson movie talk on Skype, you must have a Skype Premium membership, which costs $9 a month (or you can buy a Skype Premium day pass for $Five). Once a Premium user has set up the videoconference, he or she can add any Skype members to the movie talk, whether those people use the free service or the Premium service. If the Skype Premium member logs out of the group talk, the session completes for all participants.
Both the free and Premium versions of Skype require that you register with the company and download its software and talk sidebar, so it isn’t a superb option if you need to organize a videoconference with a group quickly (unless you know that everyone in the group has Skype). Once you’ve signed up, you can find friends via Facebook, Gmail, or Hotmail, or search by Skype screen name. Skype Premium permits videoconferencing with up to twenty four people.
Skype is a popular service, and if you’ve had it for a long time (as I have), you might need to update the software on your computer to get multiparty movie talk to work (I had to update from version Two.8.0.866 to version Five.Trio.0.1093). Fortunately, doing so is effortless: Just go to Skype in the toolbar, click Check for updates, and go after the directions. The latest version is much slicker, with fewer windows that clutter your screen.
Movie interface and quality: In general, Skype’s movie and sound quality were very good in our tests. The movie was on a par with that of Google Hangouts–generally accurate, with only a little latency inbetween what a webcam was broadcasting and what everyone else could see on the screen. Sometimes, tho’, a movie stream would freeze for about half a minute before resolving, a problem that grew worse the longer the conference continued. The sound quality was better than the audio in Google Hangouts, but only slightly.
The more people who join the call, the smaller the movie boxes get, but you can click on individual movie boxes to increase them.
The top photo is a screenshot from Skype, where the pic on the left was from a MacBook’s built-in iSight webcam and the picture on the right was from an HD webcam. The bottom pic is a screenshot of Google Hangouts; the large center photo came from the same MacBook iSight camera. The quality of each individual webcam seemed exaggerated on Skype Premium in comparison with Google Hangouts. In one test, I hooked up two desktops with 720p HD webcams and one MacBook with a built-in iSight webcam (which has always given me a pretty clear pic), and the contrast inbetween Skype’s resolution for the iSight and for the HD webcams was startling. Connecting the same three webcams in Google Hangouts did not result in such a dramatic difference, and the feed from the iSight was much clearer there.
Extra features: Skype has several useful extras built into its group movie talk service. Members of the group movie talk can send text messages in the talk box underneath the movie window; when a member types something, other participants see a puny crimson circle on the talk icon that indicates a text talk has begun. You can also send messages via SMS during the group movie talk, but you must purchase Skype credits for that service.
In addition, Skype lets you send files (pictures, screenshots, MP3s) to the other people involved in your talk, through the main window. Thanks to this convenient feature, you don’t have to navigate to your browser or email client to send files to the group.
Bottom line: Videoconferencing with Skype Premium costs money, and requires more setup than most other movie talk services do. The voice quality is the best among the services we tested, but the movie quality is no better than that of the (free) Google Hangouts service.
Tinychat
Setup: Tinychat is a browser-based movie talk service, so you have nothing to download. You can quickly begin your own talk room (or, if you’re feeling lonely, you can come in any one of the many public movie talk rooms the site hosts). Tinychat is free, but annoying banner ads surround the talk interface.
Tinychat is free, but all the ads around the movie talk window can be distracting. Once you determine to set up your own talk room, Tinychat walks you through several windows to help you select a webcam and a mic, and it asks you to choose either an open mic or a ‘Shove to talk’ button that will mute your mic until you click and hold the button down.
Inviting other people to join the movie talk is effortless. Once you’ve began a talk room, go to the Share button on top of the movie, and Tinychat will generate a URL that you can then send to others. Everyone else joining your Tinychat group needs to sign in through Facebook, sign in via Twitter, or come in anonymously as a guest. Fresh guests will be able to see the movie broadcasts that are already happening; to add their own movie to the talk room, however, guests must click ‘Begin Broadcasting’, after which a pop-up shows up requesting access to their webcam and mic.
Movie interface and quality: In Tinychat you can share only up to twelve broadcasts, but you can have an unlimited number of viewers.
Albeit the movie quality on Tinychat is pretty good, the sound quality is pitiful. I heard a noisy gyrating in the background when any noise was present on the microphone. Voices sounded louder and slightly contorted compared with voices on Hangouts and Skype, even after we made several adjustments to the microphones. And when the noise from all of the microphones was soft enough, the sound would just cut out for a minute, leaving me wondering if my headphones had malfunctioned.
In the lab test, I also experienced a Two.7-second delay on sound and movie, which was a little annoying. Sometimes, after running for more than fifteen minutes, the movie will stall, and you may have to refresh your browser to begin the movie again.
Extra features: One of the coolest things about Tinychat is the EtherPad Lite function (which you can commence by clicking the paper icon under the movie box), a word-processing box in which all members of the talk group can write, permitting collaboration on documents. Each member is assigned a pastel color, so you can see who wrote what during the movie talk.
Bottom line: Tinychat may be a good choice if you need to gather a lot of people in a movie talk room quickly. It has no real setup, and you invite other members simply by sharing a URL. It’s especially superb if you’re working on a project that requires more writing than talking (such as in explore groups or project planning) and you just want the movie available so that you can ask quick questions. It could be pretty useful for a family-wide game of charades, too. But if you want to have a long discussion with the rest of your group, Tinychat is not your best option.
Group Movie Talk Showdown: Google Hangouts and AnyMeeting Come Out on Top, PCWorld
Group Movie Talk Showdown: Google Hangouts and AnyMeeting Come Out on Top
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PCWorld | Nov 7, two thousand eleven 6:00 PM PT
Everyone wants to be in on the conversation, but sometimes distance can make in-person meetings hard. We tested five multiperson movie talk services–Google Hangouts, Skype Premium, Tinychat, AV by AIM, and AnyMeeting–to find the best place to conduct a group meeting online.
A lot of variables can affect the spectacle of a movie talk service, from the available bandwidth to the quality of the participants’ webcams. In our lab tests, we set up five computers to movie talk with one another: two desktop PCs, two Windows laptops, and a MacBook. We provided ethernet connections for the desktops and wireless Internet connections for the laptops. We also looked at how effortless it was to set up and use each service, and considered whether each service had any extra features (such as text talk or movie muffling) to enhance movie talk.
Here’s what we found.
Google Hangouts
Setup: To use Google Hangouts you need a Google account (with a Google+ profile). You also have to install a browser plug-in, which works with Windows XP or higher, Mac OS X Ten.Five or higher, or Linux. You can begin a hangout from your Google+ page by clicking a button on the right side of the screen that says ‘Embark a Hangout!’ This activity takes you to a test page, where Google starts your webcam and microphone, but no one else can see your movie broadcast.
Before you come in a hangout, Google permits you to preview what you’ll look and sound like to other members of the hangout. In the test page is a box that permits you to choose which “circles” (or groups of friends) to inform about your hangout. Once you embark the hangout, everyone in those circles will be able to see that, and they can join your hangout if they want.
When you’re ready, click the ‘String up out’ button from the test page to go to the movie talk room. You can invite more people by typing their Gmail addresses in the bar on the left side.
You can invite up to ten people to movie talk.
Movie interface and quality: While you’re in a hangout, whoever has the superior voice will inject the large main movie window, and all the other movie broadcasts will show up in smaller movie stream windows at the bottom. This arrangement, of course, assumes that every hangout will remain civil. If two people speak at the same time, with almost equal tone and volume, Google Hangouts still chooses one to be front and center in the talk. Regardless, members of the hangout can by hand adjust the layout by clicking on any of the smaller movie broadcasts to see that stream in the largest window instead.
Also, with five or more people in the same hangout, the movie streaming can stall, and sometimes it has trouble resolving. Voices can become temporarily garbled on occasion, but overall the movie quality and sound quality are both very good.
Extra features: Google Hangouts offers several features in the videoconferencing window besides just movie. One large button underneath the movie windows permits you to send text talks to the entire group during the hangout. Unless you tell people you’re going to send text, however, the Hangouts window gives no indication that a member of the group is sending written messages–each participant has to click the Talk button on their own initiative to read any messages that group members might have written.
You can observe YouTube movies while you’re in a hangout. One indeed cool feature: A YouTube button in the bottom toolbar permits you to search for movies that you can then observe in the main screen within Google Hangouts. Since Hangouts automatically mutes your mic during playback, no one else can hear you over the YouTube video’s sound; a ‘Thrust to Talk’ button lowers the video’s sound and turns on your mic if you need to interject in the hangout conversation before the movie is over.
Bottom line: Google Hangouts is a good way to gather a petite crowd to movie chat–as long as everyone has a Google account. If you’re on a laptop, you may want to use it only for brief talks, as smaller computers can lightly overheat after running Hangouts for a long time.
Skype Premium
Setup: To commence a multiperson movie talk on Skype, you must have a Skype Premium membership, which costs $9 a month (or you can buy a Skype Premium day pass for $Five). Once a Premium user has set up the videoconference, he or she can add any Skype members to the movie talk, whether those people use the free service or the Premium service. If the Skype Premium member logs out of the group talk, the session completes for all participants.
Both the free and Premium versions of Skype require that you register with the company and download its software and talk sidebar, so it isn’t a superb option if you need to organize a videoconference with a group quickly (unless you know that everyone in the group has Skype). Once you’ve signed up, you can find friends via Facebook, Gmail, or Hotmail, or search by Skype screen name. Skype Premium permits videoconferencing with up to twenty four people.
Skype is a popular service, and if you’ve had it for a long time (as I have), you might need to update the software on your computer to get multiparty movie talk to work (I had to update from version Two.8.0.866 to version Five.Trio.0.1093). Fortunately, doing so is effortless: Just go to Skype in the toolbar, click Check for updates, and go after the directions. The latest version is much slicker, with fewer windows that clutter your screen.
Movie interface and quality: In general, Skype’s movie and sound quality were very good in our tests. The movie was on a par with that of Google Hangouts–generally accurate, with only a little latency inbetween what a webcam was broadcasting and what everyone else could see on the screen. Sometimes, tho’, a movie stream would freeze for about half a minute before resolving, a problem that grew worse the longer the conference continued. The sound quality was better than the audio in Google Hangouts, but only slightly.
The more people who join the call, the smaller the movie boxes get, but you can click on individual movie boxes to enhance them.
The top photo is a screenshot from Skype, where the photo on the left was from a MacBook’s built-in iSight webcam and the picture on the right was from an HD webcam. The bottom photo is a screenshot of Google Hangouts; the large center picture came from the same MacBook iSight camera. The quality of each individual webcam seemed exaggerated on Skype Premium in comparison with Google Hangouts. In one test, I hooked up two desktops with 720p HD webcams and one MacBook with a built-in iSight webcam (which has always given me a pretty clear photo), and the contrast inbetween Skype’s resolution for the iSight and for the HD webcams was startling. Connecting the same three webcams in Google Hangouts did not result in such a dramatic difference, and the feed from the iSight was much clearer there.
Extra features: Skype has several useful extras built into its group movie talk service. Members of the group movie talk can send text messages in the talk box underneath the movie window; when a member types something, other participants see a puny crimson circle on the talk icon that indicates a text talk has begun. You can also send messages via SMS during the group movie talk, but you must purchase Skype credits for that service.
In addition, Skype lets you send files (pictures, screenshots, MP3s) to the other people involved in your talk, through the main window. Thanks to this convenient feature, you don’t have to navigate to your browser or email client to send files to the group.
Bottom line: Videoconferencing with Skype Premium costs money, and requires more setup than most other movie talk services do. The voice quality is the best among the services we tested, but the movie quality is no better than that of the (free) Google Hangouts service.
Tinychat
Setup: Tinychat is a browser-based movie talk service, so you have nothing to download. You can quickly begin your own talk room (or, if you’re feeling lonely, you can inject any one of the many public movie talk rooms the site hosts). Tinychat is free, but annoying banner ads surround the talk interface.
Tinychat is free, but all the ads around the movie talk window can be distracting. Once you determine to set up your own talk room, Tinychat walks you through several windows to help you select a webcam and a mic, and it asks you to choose either an open mic or a ‘Thrust to talk’ button that will mute your mic until you click and hold the button down.
Inviting other people to join the movie talk is effortless. Once you’ve commenced a talk room, go to the Share button on top of the movie, and Tinychat will generate a URL that you can then send to others. Everyone else joining your Tinychat group needs to sign in through Facebook, sign in via Twitter, or come in anonymously as a guest. Fresh guests will be able to see the movie broadcasts that are already happening; to add their own movie to the talk room, however, guests must click ‘Embark Broadcasting’, after which a pop-up emerges requesting access to their webcam and mic.
Movie interface and quality: In Tinychat you can share only up to twelve broadcasts, but you can have an unlimited number of viewers.
Albeit the movie quality on Tinychat is pretty good, the sound quality is pathetic. I heard a noisy humming in the background when any noise was present on the microphone. Voices sounded louder and slightly contorted compared with voices on Hangouts and Skype, even after we made several adjustments to the microphones. And when the noise from all of the microphones was soft enough, the sound would just cut out for a minute, leaving me wondering if my headphones had malfunctioned.
In the lab test, I also experienced a Two.7-second delay on sound and movie, which was a little annoying. Sometimes, after running for more than fifteen minutes, the movie will stall, and you may have to refresh your browser to embark the movie again.
Extra features: One of the coolest things about Tinychat is the EtherPad Lite function (which you can begin by clicking the paper icon under the movie box), a word-processing box in which all members of the talk group can write, permitting collaboration on documents. Each member is assigned a pastel color, so you can see who wrote what during the movie talk.
Bottom line: Tinychat may be a good choice if you need to gather a lot of people in a movie talk room quickly. It has no real setup, and you invite other members simply by sharing a URL. It’s especially fine if you’re working on a project that requires more writing than talking (such as in probe groups or project planning) and you just want the movie available so that you can ask quick questions. It could be pretty useful for a family-wide game of charades, too. But if you want to have a long discussion with the rest of your group, Tinychat is not your best option.
Group Movie Talk Showdown: Google Hangouts and AnyMeeting Come Out on Top, PCWorld
Group Movie Talk Showdown: Google Hangouts and AnyMeeting Come Out on Top
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There was an error emailing this page.
PCWorld | Nov 7, two thousand eleven 6:00 PM PT
Everyone wants to be in on the conversation, but sometimes distance can make in-person meetings hard. We tested five multiperson movie talk services–Google Hangouts, Skype Premium, Tinychat, AV by AIM, and AnyMeeting–to find the best place to conduct a group meeting online.
A lot of variables can affect the spectacle of a movie talk service, from the available bandwidth to the quality of the participants’ webcams. In our lab tests, we set up five computers to movie talk with one another: two desktop PCs, two Windows laptops, and a MacBook. We provided ethernet connections for the desktops and wireless Internet connections for the laptops. We also looked at how effortless it was to set up and use each service, and considered whether each service had any extra features (such as text talk or movie muffling) to enhance movie talk.
Here’s what we found.
Google Hangouts
Setup: To use Google Hangouts you need a Google account (with a Google+ profile). You also have to install a browser plug-in, which works with Windows XP or higher, Mac OS X Ten.Five or higher, or Linux. You can embark a hangout from your Google+ page by clicking a button on the right side of the screen that says ‘Embark a Hangout!’ This act takes you to a test page, where Google starts your webcam and microphone, but no one else can see your movie broadcast.
Before you come in a hangout, Google permits you to preview what you’ll look and sound like to other members of the hangout. In the test page is a box that permits you to choose which “circles” (or groups of friends) to inform about your hangout. Once you commence the hangout, everyone in those circles will be able to see that, and they can join your hangout if they want.
When you’re ready, click the ‘Drape out’ button from the test page to go to the movie talk room. You can invite more people by typing their Gmail addresses in the bar on the left side.
You can invite up to ten people to movie talk.
Movie interface and quality: While you’re in a hangout, whoever has the superior voice will come in the large main movie window, and all the other movie broadcasts will show up in smaller movie stream windows at the bottom. This arrangement, of course, assumes that every hangout will remain civil. If two people speak at the same time, with almost equal tone and volume, Google Hangouts still chooses one to be front and center in the talk. Regardless, members of the hangout can by hand adjust the layout by clicking on any of the smaller movie broadcasts to see that stream in the largest window instead.
Also, with five or more people in the same hangout, the movie streaming can stall, and sometimes it has trouble resolving. Voices can become temporarily garbled on occasion, but overall the movie quality and sound quality are both very good.
Extra features: Google Hangouts offers several features in the videoconferencing window besides just movie. One large button underneath the movie windows permits you to send text talks to the entire group during the hangout. Unless you tell people you’re going to send text, however, the Hangouts window gives no indication that a member of the group is sending written messages–each participant has to click the Talk button on their own initiative to read any messages that group members might have written.
You can witness YouTube movies while you’re in a hangout. One truly cool feature: A YouTube button in the bottom toolbar permits you to search for movies that you can then witness in the main screen within Google Hangouts. Since Hangouts automatically mutes your mic during playback, no one else can hear you over the YouTube video’s sound; a ‘Shove to Talk’ button lowers the video’s sound and turns on your mic if you need to interject in the hangout conversation before the movie is over.
Bottom line: Google Hangouts is a superb way to gather a puny crowd to movie chat–as long as everyone has a Google account. If you’re on a laptop, you may want to use it only for brief talks, as smaller computers can lightly overheat after running Hangouts for a long time.
Skype Premium
Setup: To begin a multiperson movie talk on Skype, you must have a Skype Premium membership, which costs $9 a month (or you can buy a Skype Premium day pass for $Five). Once a Premium user has set up the videoconference, he or she can add any Skype members to the movie talk, whether those people use the free service or the Premium service. If the Skype Premium member logs out of the group talk, the session finishes for all participants.
Both the free and Premium versions of Skype require that you register with the company and download its software and talk sidebar, so it isn’t a excellent option if you need to organize a videoconference with a group quickly (unless you know that everyone in the group has Skype). Once you’ve signed up, you can find friends via Facebook, Gmail, or Hotmail, or search by Skype screen name. Skype Premium permits videoconferencing with up to twenty four people.
Skype is a popular service, and if you’ve had it for a long time (as I have), you might need to update the software on your computer to get multiparty movie talk to work (I had to update from version Two.8.0.866 to version Five.Three.0.1093). Fortunately, doing so is effortless: Just go to Skype in the toolbar, click Check for updates, and go after the directions. The latest version is much slicker, with fewer windows that clutter your screen.
Movie interface and quality: In general, Skype’s movie and sound quality were very good in our tests. The movie was on a par with that of Google Hangouts–generally accurate, with only a little latency inbetween what a webcam was broadcasting and what everyone else could see on the screen. Sometimes, tho’, a movie stream would freeze for about half a minute before resolving, a problem that grew worse the longer the conference continued. The sound quality was better than the audio in Google Hangouts, but only slightly.
The more people who join the call, the smaller the movie boxes get, but you can click on individual movie boxes to enhance them.
The top picture is a screenshot from Skype, where the picture on the left was from a MacBook’s built-in iSight webcam and the photo on the right was from an HD webcam. The bottom photo is a screenshot of Google Hangouts; the large center photo came from the same MacBook iSight camera. The quality of each individual webcam seemed exaggerated on Skype Premium in comparison with Google Hangouts. In one test, I hooked up two desktops with 720p HD webcams and one MacBook with a built-in iSight webcam (which has always given me a pretty clear pic), and the contrast inbetween Skype’s resolution for the iSight and for the HD webcams was startling. Connecting the same three webcams in Google Hangouts did not result in such a dramatic difference, and the feed from the iSight was much clearer there.
Extra features: Skype has several useful extras built into its group movie talk service. Members of the group movie talk can send text messages in the talk box underneath the movie window; when a member types something, other participants see a petite crimson circle on the talk icon that indicates a text talk has begun. You can also send messages via SMS during the group movie talk, but you must purchase Skype credits for that service.
In addition, Skype lets you send files (pictures, screenshots, MP3s) to the other people involved in your talk, through the main window. Thanks to this convenient feature, you don’t have to navigate to your browser or email client to send files to the group.
Bottom line: Videoconferencing with Skype Premium costs money, and requires more setup than most other movie talk services do. The voice quality is the best among the services we tested, but the movie quality is no better than that of the (free) Google Hangouts service.
Tinychat
Setup: Tinychat is a browser-based movie talk service, so you have nothing to download. You can quickly commence your own talk room (or, if you’re feeling lonely, you can come in any one of the many public movie talk rooms the site hosts). Tinychat is free, but annoying banner ads surround the talk interface.
Tinychat is free, but all the ads around the movie talk window can be distracting. Once you determine to set up your own talk room, Tinychat walks you through several windows to help you select a webcam and a mic, and it asks you to choose either an open mic or a ‘Thrust to talk’ button that will mute your mic until you click and hold the button down.
Inviting other people to join the movie talk is effortless. Once you’ve embarked a talk room, go to the Share button on top of the movie, and Tinychat will generate a URL that you can then send to others. Everyone else joining your Tinychat group needs to sign in through Facebook, sign in via Twitter, or come in anonymously as a guest. Fresh guests will be able to see the movie broadcasts that are already happening; to add their own movie to the talk room, however, guests must click ‘Commence Broadcasting’, after which a pop-up shows up requesting access to their webcam and mic.
Movie interface and quality: In Tinychat you can share only up to twelve broadcasts, but you can have an unlimited number of viewers.
Albeit the movie quality on Tinychat is pretty good, the sound quality is pitiful. I heard a noisy gyrating in the background when any noise was present on the microphone. Voices sounded louder and slightly twisted compared with voices on Hangouts and Skype, even after we made several adjustments to the microphones. And when the noise from all of the microphones was soft enough, the sound would just cut out for a minute, leaving me wondering if my headphones had malfunctioned.
In the lab test, I also experienced a Two.7-second delay on sound and movie, which was a little annoying. Sometimes, after running for more than fifteen minutes, the movie will stall, and you may have to refresh your browser to commence the movie again.
Extra features: One of the coolest things about Tinychat is the EtherPad Lite function (which you can embark by clicking the paper icon under the movie box), a word-processing box in which all members of the talk group can write, permitting collaboration on documents. Each member is assigned a pastel color, so you can see who wrote what during the movie talk.
Bottom line: Tinychat may be a good choice if you need to gather a lot of people in a movie talk room quickly. It has no real setup, and you invite other members simply by sharing a URL. It’s especially fine if you’re working on a project that requires more writing than talking (such as in examine groups or project planning) and you just want the movie available so that you can ask quick questions. It could be pretty useful for a family-wide game of charades, too. But if you want to have a long discussion with the rest of your group, Tinychat is not your best option.