Start your new year with near-DVD-quality video conferencing over Skype

Here's a trick for kicking off your new year if you're into rocket science, and to get a taste of where Skype is heading. I just talked with our video engineers and got a demo of a flawless Skype video call with 640x480 resolution and 25 frames per second framerate. For comparison, the resolution of DVD video is 720x576 in PAL, and PAL framerate is equally 25 fps. The Skype video gets pretty close to that and this is why I call it "near-DVD" -- it's not fully DVD, but it's pretty close.

[See the Garage wiki for setup instructions](https://developer.skype.com/SkypeGarage/SkypeForWindowsExperimental/HighQualityVideoCalls) for hardware, software and configuration. Currently Windows-only.

Once everything was set up, the call was great. Right after starting the call, the quality wasn't actually that great, as it took a while for the systems to get set up and "calibrate" themselves. You could see the framerate and resolution improving until you reached the good quality.

We also looked at the effect of various settings on the quality. For example the ffdshow "deinterlace" option is really important -- if you don't turn that on, then you get an interlaced picture that sucks. So it's important that you follow the LINK instructions to the letter.

They have named the computers after composers in our testing lab I could see "Mozart", "Debussy", "Beethoven" and "Shostakovich".