What software is there that allows you to do video conferences with multiple people and can show the people as just the images on a black screen, with the whole screen used? I don’t want a little window (or multiple little windows) on your desktop; instead, I want something like my mockup of tilted pictures from the other day (although don’t worry about the tilting or anything like that). The point of this is: while you’re in a video conference, it’s all you’re doing, so it’s fullscreen. It’s not there so you can see someone’s face while you still write stuff in Word. Can any video conferencing software go fullscreen? Important point: I don’t care about text chat, I don’t care about audio. Just video. The audio will be transmitted by another method. Yes, yes, I know iChat in Tiger can do it, but that doesn’t help me; I’m looking at this for work, and work is all Windows boxes (so no GnomeMeeting either). It should be Free Software too, ideally. Trillian does video chat, but it needs to be the Pro version, which is a bit expensive. I’m looking for suggestions…
Something like this ? You might investigate if they released something since then, but doesn’t sound promising: “A PC version will likely be delayed until the release of Longhorn”.
Posted by Michele on April 1st, 2005.
Michele: sort of. I made reference to FaceTop in the earlier linked post; that’s the sort of principle I want, but FaceTop is all about doing collaboration on documents and so on rather than just talking and being able to see one another. Plus, as you say, no actual release yet…
Posted by sil on April 1st, 2005.
Interestingly, it looks like it’s possible to build your own UI for NetMeeting. NetMeeting’s pretty good in concept (although the UI’s not great), and I don’t understand why MS abandoned it. You have to download the Platform SDK (link to the download page which works without IE) to do this, and it’s 342MB, which is rather a lot. I might look at doing this; if you really can change the NetMeeting UI then it would be possible to build my black-screen idea without much work at all.
Posted by sil on April 1st, 2005.
Biggest problem with NetMeeting is that it doesn’t support the majority of XP camera drivers – if you’re running XP then your camera just won’t work in NetMeeting.
They are moving everything over to ‘Messenger‘.
Posted by mrben on April 1st, 2005.
MSN Messenger will go full screen. You lose the ability to text message but you didn’t care about that. You will get a PIP of yourself so at least you can still see what image you are broadcasting.
Posted by Kevin on October 4th, 2006.
try http://www.wiredred.com
Posted by jos on November 23rd, 2006.
Skype will of course do fullscreen, and a nifty little detail: it will pop up any chat messages over the fullscreen video as well…
Does anyone know if it is possible to have skype go fullscreen automatically when you receive a call? Or even better; a fullscreen interface that is constantly “on”…? Been thinking about having a PC just for that use…
Posted by Espen on March 1st, 2007.