There's a more detailed explanation on this in the comments of the
same post from another Microsoft guy:
quote:
Originally posted by Piero Sierra. Group Program Manager for Shared Data Experience
... There seems to be some confusion on the update to the webcam feature. Let me clarify that one-way video conversations are still very much supported.
It is still absolutely possible to “share your video” with a relative abroad who does not have a video camera. Or see someone else’s webcam when you do not have one. Let me explain how you do this:
Let’s say you do not have a video camera, and are chatting with a friend who does. In the chat window, click “Video” (or click the webcam icon next to your friend’s user tile). This will set up a one-way video call. You can then mute or unmute your audio by clicking the microphone. You can control your friend’s audio by clicking the speaker icon. Simple as that, and you still have the control. The inverse is also supported (where you have a webcam, and your friend does not).
Some background on what has changed:
In the past, we offered two choices to start a video conversation with someone. You could either click “Video Call” or select “Show my webcam.” Video Call is the full-featured option that includes two-way video and audio. It is how most people expect video calling to work. Show my webcam was a one-way feature, where you could show your webcam’s video to your friend, without audio. This caused a lot of confusion, and our data showed users would often click “Show my webcam”, only to be surprised they didn’t have audio, and couldn’t see their friend. They would then attempt to turn these on separately. Furthermore, the two features used a different video code-path which made switching between these scenarios hard, and also made it hard for the team to make quality & performance improvements to the scenario as a whole. In our latest update, we have simplified the command to just “Start Video Call”… If you have a webcam, but your friend does not, they will be able to see you and hear you, and you’ll be able hear them if they have a microphone. If you do not want to hear your friend, or do not want to share your audio, you can simply toggle the microphone icon next to your picture or the speaker icon next to your friend‘s picture.
There are only really two aspects that are different:
(1) it is no longer easy to hide your webcam’s feed if you have one enabled when you start a video call (you can still do this using the AV settings dialog).
(2) You can no longer set up “webcam rings” with multiple people sharing silent video one-way.
There are valid reasons to enable both of these scenarios, but their usage was very infrequent, and made both the user experience and the code overly complicated. This is why we have chosen to move forward with a simpler option.
Please look for a post soon about our expanded video capabilities in Wave 4. ...
Ok, so I can mute my microphone if I don't want to send audio, and people can still see my cam even if the don't have a cam and/or mic themselves. That's good. And I understand the reason for simplyfying. But you're still missing some things (in fact you ripped them out) which really should be present in a decent video chat.
1: Give people full control over what they send, so in addition of turning off audio give people the option to turn off the cam too so they can truely passively watch someone's cam without having to disconnect their own cam from the PC. In fact if you really want to do this properly people should be able to specify what they want to send before the communication starts, I don't want to have to find the mute button in panic while my music is blasting through the speakers, just so I can view someone's webcam.
2: Allow people to have multiple video calls simultaneously. Sure there are technical limitations to this, mainly bandwidth. You might want to inform the users quality degrades as more calls are made, but more and more countries are rolling out fiber now. Soon it will be possible for me to get 100Mbit up and down at my home in the small country of the Netherlands, in other areas high bandwidth connections like this to the home has already been possible for some years. Skype is starting to allow multiple conversations simultaneously too (in their latest beta).
Hope they'll still implement that in the Wave 4 release.
Update: Posted my message above on the MS blog too, and got this reply (probably not aimed at me specificaly)
quote:
Originally posted by Piero Sierra. Group Program Manager for Shared Data Experience
Thanks for the feedback and suggestions on this topic & bearing with the complex explanation. We're looking at some of these for Wave 4.
At least they are reading the comments, let's hope they actually act on it too.
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