Gmail Chat: Now With Video and Voice

After having signed a deal with MGM Studios that would allow Google to stream full length movies and TV episodes on YouTube, Google decided to sprinkle some video on Gmail too. They spiced up Gmail with something that was long missing.

Gmail chat now does video and voice too. After having chat and rich mail rolled in a single package, video and voice chat comes as a welcome add-on. According to the GMail blog, they have tried to make it "an easy to use, seamless experience with high quality audio and video all for free." My first hand experience says they have faired very well in delivering what they tried for. It uses Vidyo technology which they say is covered under pending patents.

Both participants of the chat need to install a small package of video plugin from here to enable this feature in Gmail. The Mac installer comes as 2.4 MB download and the Windows XP version is a 476 KB initial downloader which then downloads and installs the remaining content. On the Mac, the installation DMG contains a .PKG file and an uninstaller. You need to quit all your browsers before installing it. The Mac version needs Mac OS X 10.4 or later and 5.6 MB of space. Once the installation is complete, it opens the Chat settings page in your Gmail account. The defaults worked fine for me. You can verify if your settings are correct by opening that little section that shows the audio input/ output levels and starts your web cam. The audio output levels here may sound a little low but this is just the level at which you hear the ring that is played for an incoming chat request. The troubleshooting link doesn't really offer any good help yet other than a three step installation guide.

Once everything is in place, you should see a green camera icon besides your name in the chat panel in Gmail. You could start a video and voice chat from the little popup menu on the chat window. A small panel slides up and starts your web cam. The other participant hears a ring and must accept the invitation to video chat before they can view your web cam. The visual and voice clarity is amazing here (unlike that in the settings verification page). It uses  XMPP, RTP and H.264 standards, so that level of performance is expected. You can pop that window out, just as you would during a regular chat to resize the video frame. To have a more immersive experience, you could turn to the full screen mode, which didn't fail to impress me.

What I didn't like was a little echo that I could hear at times. The echo cancellation option in the settings page didn't seem to have any effect in removing it. It didn't work for me if I set my status to invisible.

Overall it is an impressive move by Gmail. There's a good news for developers, for they can leverage this technology in their own applications too.

So, Gmail is indeed getting close to doing our laundry. You can read more about this feature in the Official GMail Blog here.