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[Usman55]

I bought a new webcam yesterday for my 'other' computer. It is from Creative and it's called LIVE! CAM Socialize. It has a video resolution of upto 800x600 pixels @30 FPS. It is a great webcam and all. It has a very good quality when using it with it's own software or on webcamtoy.com but it has sh***y quality in a Skype video call. There could be two possible reasons that I've figured. One is that the computer is old and has a Pentium 4 2.60 GHz processor. And the other is low network speed. But my laptop webcam works fine on the same network so that can't be it.

Can someone suggest a way to fix this problem or to somehow 'force' the video resolution? I read somewhere that adding 3 lines of code in the config.xml file will do this but even after doing that the resolution is the same.

[Shim]

You need to check the mega pixel of the webcam before you're buying..

[Usman55]

As I mentioned above, the webcam itself has very good quality. It captures photo and video at a perfect resolution. The problem arises when I use Skype. Skype lowers down the resolution. I need a fix for that.

[Shim]

Did you get a cd with your webcam's drivers..? Use webcam softwares and see if its still in bad quality.

[Usman55]

I installed the drivers from the webcam disc. And if the problem is with the drivers, the webcam wouldn't work at a good quality at all. Then he problem wouldn't be with Skype alone but everything else too. But that is not the case.

[Codex]

One possible theory is that since the new webcam has a higher resolution, it would decrease the webcam quality instead of scaling the resolution. Your best option is decreasing the webcam resolution.

[Usman55]

And how do I do that?

It's software allows me to change the resolution but only on that software, not in general.

And it could have decreased the quality while scaling the resolution but the quality I'm getting is way too low for that.

[XTechVB]

Higher video quality means more data Skype has to send over the network.
Maybe lowering the resolution is sort of a safety feature, This may be Skype's way of keeping video-calls as close to real-time as possible when the network speed is too low or not enough for the quality and resolution of your webcam.

[Usman55]

Anyway to FORCE Skype to send slightly better resolution?

[Codex]

You can try this, however I don't believe it will affect much.
http://www.nodewave.com/software/window ... Video.html
(I personally haven't tried it, just found it when googling)