Hands On With ooVoo Videoconferencing

I'm not a huge fan of video conferences. You've got to do a bit of setup and the return on your investment is usually a grainy, out-of-sync picture. Plus, you've got to comb your hair and smile. But with new PCs that often have built-in webcams and with faster processors, having a casual video chat or a small business conference is getting easier and easier.

Despite its bizarre name (ooVoo is an emoticon-type logo for two eyes looking at video), ooVoo is one of the handsomest and best-looking videoconferencing services I've tried. Plus it's fun. The latest version allows you to easily connect with six others for a video conference call. It also lets your video-less callers get in on the act by connecting them with a landline or mobile phone. (Calling is available only in the U.S. and Canada.)

Skype offers video calling as well as multiple-person calls, but I find that the quality and the interface are not as good. ooVoo relies on what it calls a "secret sauce" that combines peer-to-peer networking along with ooVoo servers to make the video high quality. The company says that it does a number of analyses on motion and faces to provide the best image.

The ability to record a conversation and save it to a variety of formats including .AVI will appeal to video bloggers as well as the archivers of a meeting. (Not to worry, you are notified whenever the conversation is being recorded.) You can also send a video message to an ooVoo user, so you don't have to wait for them to be online.

Of course a video service is only fun if you know people to talk to, so ooVoo will import your contacts from Gmail, Skype, Yahoo! mail, and others. You can share files or send a text message, too. For fun, you can download some extra software (21MB) that lets you add video effects—cutting and pasting heads on each other for example.

To get started, all you need to do is download ooVoo, register your name and password, and add a contact person who will do the same. The black background, the 3D-looking screen, and the easy to understand pull-down menus make it an all around nice (and free) experience.

The company is working on a Mac version of ooVoo and will ultimately open up its environment to make it easy for people to embed video into their web pages. Last year, I broadcast our holiday dinner to family that couldn't make it home via Skype, and the results were not very rewarding. This year, it's ooVoo at the dinner table. If you download ooVoo and want to try it out, look for me. I'm Robinr.

Related: PC Magazine's comparison of ooVoo versus SightSpeed.