03-26-2012, 03:53 PM

Hi All . . . Please check out my Mini's specs listed under my profile. All my family enjoys Skype and once a week we all get together for a family chat. I am the only family member with a Premium account, so I am the only one who can host the weekly conference call. All the other family members have Windoz machines with i5's or better. We all have Roadrunner ISP...I have high speed turbo. OK...to the problem...our family Skype calls are rarely better than fair quality. Eventually the call regresses and eventually falls apart, starting with voice echos and then lagging and freezing. Could it be that my Mini falls short on its capability to maintain a high quality call? How much of the burden falls on my machine since I am the host? Is my processor too "feeble" to be the host? There are never more than four cams going. One-on-one calls are of a much higher quality and most of the time the one-on-one calls are spot on. Any ideas or answers? . . . thanks, Dogbreath

03-26-2012, 04:46 PM

Your machine should be more than capable of handling the host part of the call. If the call is degrading over time, it could be related to your ISP connection. Most SKYPE calling depends entirely on the type of connection you have. If you have a slow patchy connection, the calls are going to reflect the same.

Also, you need to consider the connections your family members have. And the fact that conference calling requires more bandwidth.

I've run across the same problem on government conference calls that were made with expensive Telco equipment, so it's not a SKYPE problem per se.

03-26-2012, 04:50 PM

Here are the group video call system requirements. I don't think your CPU is the bottleneck:

"System requirements

Group video calls can be between three or more people (up to a maximum of 10). For the best quality, we recommend calls with up to five people.

For the best video quality, we recommend you use a high-speed broadband connection of 4 Mbps down/512 kbps up and a computer with a Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz processor. The minimum you'll need is a high-speed broadband connection of 512 kbps down/128 kbps up and a computer with a 1 GHz processor."

03-26-2012, 05:02 PM

Like was said, Bandwidth. Your ISP could be 50Mbs and still between your ISP and the Skype server could be an overloaded connection. Everything from your computer to the server has to be fast and have a lot of bandwidth. Also like Mdfuller said it could be your friends connection to the internet somewhere down the line that could be slowing up the works.

Do a Traceroute to any site and see just how many Hops (different servers) you have to go through to finally reach the site you are going to.

03-26-2012, 07:22 PM

Thank you all for your input and answers. It gets even weirder now because my Mother (82 years old and loves Skype) has the slowest internet speed but her Skype audio/video quality is always the best and never craps out! As long as it is good for her, I can live with the rest. I'll just count my blessings. I am delighted to be a part of this forum.

03-27-2012, 02:58 PM

Originally Posted by Dogbreath

Thank you all for your input and answers. It gets even weirder now because my Mother (82 years old and loves Skype) has the slowest internet speed but her Skype audio/video quality is always the best and never craps out! As long as it is good for her, I can live with the rest. I'll just count my blessings. I am delighted to be a part of this forum.

Keep in mind that "the highest Internet speed" is not always the best. You have to keep things like delay, jitter, and dropped packets in mind as well. The quality is more important than the "speed" of the connection. Google QoS or quality of service if you need something to put you to sleep

03-27-2012, 08:50 PM

QoS sounds like it is something worth reading since I am curious about it now...I'll give it a look over...and thanks!