I had a chance to check out Facebook Video Calling last night with my parents. The video quality seemed really good, actually seemed to be a little better than normal Skyping with my parents. Getting it initially setup was a bit difficult. I had no problem downloading and installing the executable, but my father ran into some issues. After we had everything ironed out and the video was actually videoing, I had a problem where I could not hear anything. As it turns out, the Facebook Video Calling was forcing the audio output to my laptop’s headphone jack. This was the only problem, there is a place to change where the mic source is coming from, but there does not appear to be a place to change where the audio source is sent to. It took a while to figure this out on my end and I suspect it will be one of those hard to figure out problems for a lot of people.

Apart from those hiccups, the only thing I didn’t like about the video call was the forced ‘always on top’ video output. You can minimize the video, but I’d prefer it to just be sitting there with the ability to have stuff over it. Overall, it was a pretty decent trial, needs some work and I am curious about how they plan to upgrade it in the future — e.g. will everyone need to download and reinstall the executable whenever there is an update?

Haven’t had a chance to try out Google+’s Hangout feature yet, but from what I hear it seems like a better implementation than Facebook’s Video Calling.

Have you tried Facebook Video Calling yet? What were your thoughts?

2 Comments

  1. I didn’t really fix it, I just plugged in my headphones and used them.

    Though, I suspect you might be able to go into your audio settings and set the speakers to be the default output.

    Lew

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.