​A smoother voice and video experience

New post from some of our video chat engineers on the Google talkabout blog, discussing some of our recent work in improving service quality. Like most Google services, video chat has lots of checks to let us measure how good our service is. So we can see in real numbers that we've dramatically improved the quality from when we launched the service a year ago. It's great seeing the needle move as our engineers roll out continual adjustments and improvements almost every week.

We have spent the last few months focusing on three things: quality, quality, and quality! For those of you with the Google voice and video chat plugin installed, you have recently received an automatic update that contains:

• A fix that reduces crashes on newer macs (Mac OS X v10.6.2 specifically)
• A fix for webcam compatibility on Windows (including HP webcams)
• Several fixes to increase plugin stability
• Several fixes to the infrastructure used to set up and connect your video calls.

From users who have chosen to “Report quality statistics” in their chat settings, we can see a substantial increase in call connection rates and a big decrease in the call drop rate. We hope that this will result in more enjoyable conversations with our software.

As with all software, working on improving quality is a never ending process, so we hope that you will continue to report any issues you have in our user forum, and we will continue to work on improving connection rates and call quality.