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I'm wondering if it's the Skype technology itself has a problem. I haven't looked into it too extensively, but through experience, group calls (without video) i

I'm wondering if it's the Skype technology itself has a problem. I haven't looked into it too extensively, but through experience, group calls (without video) in Skype tend to be choppy, and filled with problems (people dropping off, etc). In comparison, I've paid for a 200 slot Ventrilo server for the last 3 years. While this is centralized, it's on a shared server, and I doubt the majority of NA/Euro connections wouldn't rival at least a 20-slot Ventrilo server in terms of hardware and bandwidth. Ventrilo GSM 6.1 44khz codex transmits amazing quality, regardless of whether I'm speaking to 1 other person, or 199 other people. Does anyone actually know the reason for this?

thomaslangston 15y ago
My instinctual understanding is that Skype has a distributed nature, and the hand-offs/re-syncing were primarily to blame. I don't have any concrete basis for this conjecture.
timdorr 15y ago
Skype one-to-one is peer-to-peer. Your video data goes straight to the other person. Skype group video chat is run through their servers. The aggregate the video sources on their side and send those back out to each participant. So, there's an inherent cost of that much data (n*(n-1), I believe) and the server itself that Skype needs to pay for. Audio group chat is easier because the resulting audio streams can be overlaid on top of each other for everyone in the same group. So, if 3 people are talking in a 10 person chat, it's 3 inbound streams and just 10 outbound streams, not 30 outbound. Video can't be overlaid like that (at least not without it looking weird :P)