Anyone have a suggestion for an alternative to skype? My family has a weekly conference call, and we originally used skype, but lately the conversations have just become unbearable. Half the time we're just listening to people's voices sloooooow down or stutter step.

I'm trying to find something that the 4 of us can use to chat, but simple enough my father use, and I would appreciate any help someone could offer.

Thanks!

My wife and I are using Gmail video chat while she' out of town, but I'm not sure if that can support 4 people.

ventrilo if you don't need video

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BTW - weekly conference calls? What are you, a family of project managers? heh

And I'm not sure Ventrilo passes the simplicity test. It's a bitch to setup

Ventrilo is a possibility. Setup is no problem, I can handle that for my pops, just logging on and the actual use has to be crotchety-old-friendly.

And as for project managers, actually, my sister is (insurance company) and my father sorta was (Army Corps of Engineers). Though weekly conference calls sounds more technical than it is. We just need a conference-capable voice chat so we can set aside an hour each week and let everyone know what's going on. We've always been a rather close family, but we find the usual social chit chat (calling, e-mail, etc) to be tedious and we avoid it. However once we started Skype and we discovered we could "meet up" get all our updates to each other out of the way all at once, and then get the fuck outta dodge, it became a much more amenable situation.

Sadly Skype is going to fuck all. Thanks for the Vent suggestion. My half-brother actually has a server already, but he's a fuck-wit. I'll look around a bit more before I go that route.

Thanks!

Ventrilo is quite simple to set up. You just need 1 person that can tell the other people to shut up and listen long enough to manage it. Skype's codec quality sucks balls anyway.

You can self host up to 8 people, it's really simple.

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Marauder Harabakc Goat

Have to beg to differ. For a year, my mom and I did video conference calls between London and Iowa. There was exactly one issue in all that time and it had to do with the network dropping at her side (cable modem went offline). Other than that, it was flawless and easy for my mom to wrap her head around to use.

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Use ventrilo for 10 minutes, you'll hear teh difference in seconds.

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Marauder Harabakc Goat

I'll look into self-hosting a vent server then.

Thanks for the input, guys. I appreciate it.

Oryx vent.


Skype is garbage.

Funny how the main premise of this weekly call is so you don't have to waste time talking to each other on a regular basis. I truly love the notion!

We used to use Yahoo instant messenger conference. It always worked pretty well for us... just have to not step on each other when you key the mic.

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Yeah, kinda fucked up, but then that's our family.