I had an interesting evening last night, experimenting with using Skype as a zero-cost voice-conferencing and instant-messaging tool.

It was an interesting attempt – overall I give the experience 6 out of 10.

Normally at this time of year I’d be spending a week in California at a conference, but this year I can’t fit it into my schedule; my friend and colleague Gilles is a gadget-geek, is attending, and has been raving about Skype for some time, and thus last week we conceived a plan for me to attend via Skype – and thus I installed version 0.8.x of Skype for MacOS, only to discover that it had no support for firewall proxies…

Oh, poop.

During the weekday evenings at home, Gilles and I established that reasonable Skype communication was possible between Geneva and Basingstoke; Skype seems a bit more sensitive to both CPU and Network load than does Apple’s iChatAV, but the latter (to the best of my knowledge) lacks interoperability, breadth of client support, and the ability to drill through web proxies. (aside: does anyone have an AIM/iChat voice-client for Linux?)

Skype also appears to want to eat more CPU than does iChat, especially on idle.

Came monday, and Skype fortuitously released v0.9.x of their software for MacOS, which can deal with HTTP proxies!

Oh joy!

Once running, it is all pretty good; I have/had to make allowances for the limitations of the laptop system at Gilles’ end (microphone next to keyboard and fan, alas) – but there seemed to be less round-trip latency with my experience of Skype-to-California than I’ve had with iChatAV-to-Melbourne/Chicago/NewJersey.

I would wildly theorise that iChat buffers more (== more latency) in favour of smoother sound, whereas i think Skype tries to be faster/snappier, suffering consequent jitteryness, occasionally diving into a buzzy insectoid cacophony from digital artefact hell.

iChatAV is superb at rejecting audio feedback; Skype seems less so, but not dreadfully badly, and in any case the problem is solved by wearing a set of standard audio headphones to break the loop. I was using my favourite Sennheiser HD600 headphones which afforded me great clarity of picking up the room’s speaker at any given time, but which also gave a superb, audiophile rendition of Gilles’ laptop fan spinning up-and-down every 15 seconds.

In the end, all the jitter and laptop sounds gave me a headache and I had to quit, but it was an interesting effort. If we had a better, omnidirectional microphone at the other end – on a long lead – and a dedicated system (or one that someone was not using heavily) doing the encoding, then I would put it on par with many (not all) of the rather expensive voice conferences that I have attended in the past.

For a 4 hour concall, for $0.00 + the cost of the hassle it was not bad. We would need practice, a little more planning, and a little hardware investment to finesse it, that’s all.

Next step: I would like to try to SolarisX86 on some box and try to test the Linux Skype binary under Janus … more news as events warrant.