Video

Earlier this month, we promised an update to Skype for Mac that would get along beautifully with Leopard's firewall. Today's hotfix to Skype 2.7 for Mac beta does just that. In other words, users of Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) are welcome to run Skype with confidence.

The second thing that we believe will bring smiles to a lot of folks is this: today's beta version of Skype 2.7 for Mac adds attractive pixel muscle to your video calls. That's because we've now turned on 640x480-pixel video by default.

So, as long as your webcam can handle this resolution, your friends should see the bigger-and-improved you on their screens. At a better frame rate, too -- we've been squeezing up to 25 fps out of our systems.

Now, because sending out higher-resolution video needs a faster processor and a fatter internet pipe, you'll benefit greatly from having a fast machine (think Core 2 Duo) and a broadband connection with at least 384kbps upload speeds.

If the receiver is using a pre-2.7 version of Skype for Mac, or if their machine cannot handle 640x480 video resolution (like G4 or G5 Macs that are slower than 1.25 GHz), the sender's Skype software will scale the video feed down to 320x240 pixels (or even 160x120, if needed).

Please remember we're dealing with beta software here. So you may encounter the occasional quirk and hiccup as you're using it. If you'd rather stick with public versions Skype that have a lot of beta wrinkles ironed out, we've just issued a Leopard-friendly hotfix to the public version of Skype 2.6 for Mac. Enjoy!

Video support for Skype for Mac will be one of our major acts this year. You can tell that by just taking a look at our various blog posts and the comments here, especially in the Mac blog. Whatever we post, we have people asking "WHERE IS VIDEO FOR SKYPE FOR MAC? GIMME SKYPE FOR MAC WITH VIDEO." It's great to see this much interest and we'll surely meet it by bringing you a fine video version with the superb quality you’ve grown to expect from Skype.

Among all the excitement, we recently learned that there is an early development version of Skype for Mac with video floating around some warez sites. What you need to know about this version is that it is an internal unstable development version, and thus it is extremely buggy. It may and will destroy your contacts and other data. It is completely unsupported and if you experience problems due to using this version, you’re on your own. The only way to make sure you’re getting the correct and official version of Skype is to download it directly from skype.com, or from the pages of one of our official [partners](http://about.skype.com/partners.html).

Another thing worth noting about the video part is that the version going around is two months old, and thus is definitely not the "latest and greatest" that you’ll see once we release it. It’s not yet ready for primetime, but will be soon. It sounds old, but please bear with us. Not much longer to go.

Here’s a screenshot of an actual video call with Skype for Mac.

We will, we promise. Not quite yet I'm afraid but we're working hard to make it happen. Jaanus put it nicely [in this blog entry](http://share.skype.com/sites/en/2006/03/how_is_skype_video_on_mac_comi.html).