Audio/Video Chat Solution [closed]

I've been using Skype pretty heavily for about 2-3 years now, and I've been steadily becoming frustrated with its performance; things that may first off be acceptable, but after encountering them time after time simply become unacceptable.

In short, I'm looking for an alternative tool for video and audio chatting.

I've looked into a number of solutions, yet none of them come close to Skype. And that, I find, is depressing.

In my search, I have been grading solutions on a number of factors:

1. Ease of use
   While I encourage advanced options, the application itself should be easy to use to begin with.

2. High quality/performance
   Video and audio quality should be both high quality and configurable to my needs (transfer-rate and FPS limiting).

3. Lightweight Interface
   Bubbles, emoticons, glossy graphics and customizable skins are fine for some people, but those options should be configurable and preferably disabled entirely if I choose to. Something like pidgin's interface is acceptable.

Aisde from Skype, I have tried:

• Windows Live Messenger
  Terrible user-interface, focus is not on video and serves mostly as an advertising medium.

• OpenFire + Spark
  OpenFire + Spark with the Red5 plugin was buggy and required a lot of configuration. Ultimately it became too frustrating to warrent its use.

• iom.im
  Web interface is clunky and video is low-quality.

• ooVoo
  Another terrible interface, slow and not focused for video calling; see complaints about Windows Live Messenger

I'm starting to lose hope in my search for a more focused, higher performing and higer quality video chat platform other than Skype. What are the recommended solutions?

Solution 1:

If you have a Google account, you can AV chat with all of your friends who have Google accounts too. It's integrated into GMail, and both Empathy and Pidgin support AV chats this way.

Solution 2:

I've had some pretty good conversations with http://www.tokbox.com

Web based, lets you video chat with up to like 20 people at the same time, easy, can invite non members, etc.

You're not going to get the most insane video quality though. It's acceptable though. At least skype has high quality video calls ( 640x480 @ 30fps )