Persistent Home Videoconferencing Solution? 253
An anonymous reader writes "I'm moving very soon for work, and will be several hundred miles away from my young family for six to nine months. Obviously I'll travel back as often as possible, and there's always Skype and XBLA video, but the whole 'now it's time to talk to dad' thing seems ... a little weak. I was wondering the Slashdot community could help me come up with a more persistent solution. Ideally what I want is an always-on connection between a pc/monitor/camera/speakers in my old kitchen and my new kitchen, so if we're in the kitchens, we can see each other and interact semi-normally. (We're a kitchen-focused family.) Most solutions I can find time out pretty quick, or require some knowledge on the part of the users, and the tech-savvy people are only going to be in one kitchen, to put it politely!" (Read on for a few more details.)
"I do have a reasonable number of Windows PCs and Macs (and game consoles), but no alt. OS machines, so something for retail OSes would be better — I haven't tested the PS3 camera for long durations, but I know the conferencing quality with a PS3 is pretty good, and that could be an option too. Any camera recommendations would be good. We have sweet access at our house, but it will need to be wireless to the kitchen from the router."
Panasonic IP camera (Score:3, Informative)
very IE dependent, but we had a setup with a microphone (internal to the device) and external speakers,
my wifes family from overseas could manage it without a problem
the remote viewer had 'click to talk' functionality- we'd be in the office and suddenly the speakers would crackle 'szia' and they could see the grandchildren and we could talk clearly...
setup was technical, using it was not...
video was one sided only..
Skype + Auto Answer (Score:5, Informative)
Create a dedicated Skype account which is set to auto start video and accept calls from it's contact list, add your skype to that contact list and you're all set. All you have to do is click call whenever you're in your kitchen and there will be a video uplink. Runs on windows or mac with any old x86 box and webcam, pretty close to $0. Just make sure the PC doesn't go to sleep (more than $0).
I tried this a few times (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I tried this a few times (Score:2, Informative)
I agree with DNS-and-BIND. We (me and my girlfriend) used to play RPG with a group of friends and when we moved to another city we setup a skype call so we all could keep playing together. It was awkward, video quality was not as good as we were expecting. Sometimes there were frequent crashes, which was really annoying and took away most of the fun - it's just not nice to be interrupted when you are having a lot of fun... you can shrug it off at the start but in the long term it starts to hurt. Even with a high quality mic it's hard to hear people, specially the ones that are more far away, and it gets much worse with any kind of background noise. Mics simple can't compensate volume levels in the same way as we do and most of them are build to be used really close to one's mouth. Not having eye contact is definitely the worst part. It's hard to focus on who is talking and there's no way to move around. You get the feeling that you watching some event and can't really be part of it.
If you somehow manage to get a really high quality video feed on both sides and a microphone that works well on an open and not so quiet environment it may be possible to achieve a somewhat working solution. You and your family will still need to have patience and expect failures and crashes from time to time.
Re:I hate to say it, but (Score:2, Informative)
"Lonely" is the absolute worst thing you can make your wife feel if you want to keep her, and is the reason most often given for infidelity.
You don't want a video conference solution (Score:3, Informative)
Video conferencing is for two parties to voice chat, video chat, and share data, etc for a set period of time. I think what you really should think about is a webcam streaming service. There are many sites out there that allow you to embed a live feed from a webcam in a webpage for a small fee. A lot of them will provide the page and give you direct URL and provide the local client software to stream the feed to the web page. You get one for your computer, your wife gets one for the home PC. You watch their page and they watch yours. All of this is designed to run full time as long as the PC is on, can be set to start at boot up, will save your settings and logon info etc. That way you have an always on solution. I don't remember the service I used to use. A quick look at google got me to ustream.com
Some options (from $$$ to cheap) (Score:2, Informative)
1. Tandberg or Polycom. I would guess this is out of the question due to price, but it needs to be mentioned since these folks install systems like this all the time and is used in mission critical operations.
They'll support remote pan&tilt of the cameras, microphones placed throughout your kitchen and lots of nice options. Be prepared to refinance your mortgage, though.
2. Surveillance cameras + PC on both ends, with a web browser w/ full screen camera view bookmarked. Expensive, and the picture quality will be nowhere near the #1 option, but still very reliable. I have good experience with Panasonic cameras, and they have wireless options available.
3. Macs with iChat + MobileMe. I'm pretty sure this will Just Work, although I haven't tested how timeouts / reconnects work. Still, with MobileMe or by opening some router ports, you'll be able to log into the computer on the far end and do whatever needs to be done to get it up and running.
4. If you want something a bit more portable, the iPhone 4 with FaceTime might be an option.
There are a lot of other options, like using SIP softphones like Eyebeam and setting up a software PBX, but this is probably too much work unless you happen to be very interested in IP telephony :)
As for webcams, the built-in iSight cameras are good, as are some of the high end Logitech and Microsoft cameras (Microsoft just released a quite cheap + high quality one). Keep in mind, however, that these are built for sitting close to the computer, so it won't be as good for people sitting far away. Option #1 or #2 is better for this, since they're optimized for viewing an entire room.
The answer is Lifesize (Score:2, Informative)