Instant Messengers

• Third Party Server
• Peer to Peer, also known as Computer to Computer

In the third party server system, your video stream is funneled through a server belonging to the company hosting your IM. Because bandwidth is extremely expensive, and they are essentially giving you this service for free, they naturally want to limit the bandwidth your video is using. Therefore, the size and quality of the image stream avaliable is going to be small and very limited in quality. Consider how much your high speed internet connection costs, then multiply that by the tens of thousands of simultaneous users that Yahoo is trying to host.

The advantage to a third party system is if you have a router or firewall, you don't usually have to do any special configuration to your router to use the service.

The disadvantages are lower quality video, and the possibility of denied service if the host is too busy with other things.

In a Peer to Peer system the video is sent directly from your computer to the other persons computer, bypassing the third party computer all together. In this system the only bandwidth constraint is the speed of your Internet connection and that of your Internet Provider. When you understand this factor it becomes fairly obvious that you can get a much better picture using a Peer to Peer system.

The advantage to Peer to Peer is higher quality and larger image capability.

The disadvantage to Peer to Peer is that if you have a router or firewall, it must be configured to pass the data stream through to your computer. By default routers will block this stream.

• MSN messenger uses UPnP (Universal Plug n Play) to configure your router for you. However, you must have a newer router which is UPnP capable and UPnP must be turned on in your router.

• When you install Skype it sets a random incoming port number to use. According to the help pages at Skype, you can find the port number in the Skype Options menu.

• Yahoo Super Webcam Mode uses incoming port 5100 which must be mapped through to your computer.

The two most common reasons your camera may seem slow as viewed on your computer:

• Your computer may be too slow to handle the data stream from your camera
• There may be too many other things running on your computer, not leaving sufficient resources to deal with the camera