

Show HN: Awesometalk – Free video calling without the hassle - brendanib
https://www.awesometalk.com/

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zachlatta
How is this different than [https://appear.in/](https://appear.in/)?

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brendanib
Right now they're very similar, but we're working on getting Awesometalk onto
more platforms than just the web. We want you to be able to send anyone an
Awesometalk link, and no matter what device they're using, have a
conversation.

~~~
zachlatta
Isn't that exactly what the web is good at though? Cross-platform? Right now I
can send a friend an appear.in link and they can open it on their Android
device and join the chat. I don't think Safari on iOS has WebRTC support yet,
but I can't imagine that they're not working on it.

~~~
brendanib
Let's say you send a link to someone on an iOS device -- we can prompt them to
install a native app, then as soon as they open the app, with no login, your
call starts.

Apple actually is refusing to add WebRTC to Safari, because if you have good
HTML5 support and WebRTC, you can do much more outside of a native app, which
hurts their ability to control the app ecosystem, and helps developers ship to
Android and iOS on the same day. I hope this changes, but right now it doesn't
seem promising.

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mholt
Awesome! I just tried it from a university campus to a business ISP (both very
high bandwidth) and the quality was crystal-clear.

Two immediate requests:

1) Screen sharing

2) Group chats

Definitely loving that there's no other software or installations required.
Looking forward to its further development.

(Edit: Already got an email from the developers, and I understand the security
limitations of easy screen sharing, so I guess just do what is possible; I'm
not asking for the impossible. Just easier than installing some full-blown
software, if possible, would be great.)

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brendanib
Hey, I'm one of the co-founders of Awesometalk. We started working on this 2
weeks ago and I'd be happy to answer any questions you have.

~~~
abengoam
Hey there, I just tried it and my experience was not very satisfactory. I
imagine you are interested on the feedback so there it goes: video quality was
low (super choppy, video was getting frozen at several points), voice quality
was low (I could understand about 50% of what was said) and when a third
person tried to join it got a message "This call is full right now" (which I
don't know if it's a bug or by design - it's not clear if this is just a
1-to-1 service). Anyways, the concept is very cool and I hope you get to make
it work. A reliable service like this would remove a lot of my communication
headaches.

~~~
brendanib
Thanks for the feedback, sorry your first call didn't go well.

When the connection is poor, as it sounds like it was in this case, would you
be okay if we fell back to audio-only and explained why? This seems like a
better experience than trying to fight through lag, but we want to be careful
not to arbitrarily cut off your video feed.

~~~
rogerbinns
In Skype I have the option to show call technical info turned on.

It is immensely helpful since it shows continually updated values for latency,
packet loss (in both directions), codec in use, bitrates etc. From that I can
easily tell what the issues are (latency spikes vs packet loss are hard to
distinguish due to the same symptoms).

That isn't helpful for the masses, but you can display some sort of connection
quality indicator. You can also offer suggestions on seeing latency spikes or
packet loss (try to work out of they are upstream or downstream).

The usual solution to video is to reduce bitrate, resolution and framerate.
Blocky video that is taking seconds to update is an obvious indicator of
connection quality issues.

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brendanib
Thanks Roger -- we really want to create a connection quality indicator like
you describe, kind of like the number of bars on your cell connection.

One of our biggest frustrations with existing services is that it's hard to
tell why the call quality is poor - is it my connection, your connection, or
the service's fault?

Can I shoot you an email when we get a beta version of that indicator working?
I'd love to get your feedback on it.

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toomuchtodo
Are you collecting network information/statistics from both sides of the call?
That may assist in troubleshooting.

~~~
brendanib
We are collecting anonymous data about the network, browser, etc. and tying it
back to core metrics like call length, but there's always more we can do. I'm
really hoping that more browsers start to support the network information API
natively too: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/WebAPI/Network_Info...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/WebAPI/Network_Information)

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waldir
This only seems to work for two people at the moment (i.e. no group calls),
but for that use case, it seems promising.

As it happens, for the past few days I've been trying out a lot of tools for
online video/audio conferencing, and made a summary of their features here:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1C1gAWPBmAWsQEo78ysds...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1C1gAWPBmAWsQEo78ysdsjdagwobtUX1zh_YCIb3fWIU/edit)
(I didn't include Awesometalk because I'm only looking for group meeting
tools, not one-to-one video chat)

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superduper33
Screenshare pls

