Wednesday, August 05, 2009

TinyChat Doubles Video Resolution and Adds Moderator Tools [Video Chat]

TinyChat Doubles Video Resolution and Adds Moderator Tools [Video Chat]

We've been fairly impressed with TinyChat, the instant multimedia chat service that offers video and audio connections for a dozen people at once. Now the video resolution and frame rates are better, and room creators have better controls.

Tinychat's blog claims a 4x improvement to free account video quality, while ReadWriteWeb states that video resolutions and frame rates have doubled—though that might be the same improvement stated different ways. What's really helpful are the new controls for room creators. Room owners can force a "push to talk" mode, where those signing on without headphones only talk when they press a screen button, eliminating endless echo effects. Owners can also get specific enabling of certain chatters' audio and video feeds, force users to sign in with Twitter handles to verify identities, and ban users based on IP address for 24 hours.

A bunch more bug fixes and minor features went into Tinychat recently, detailed at the blog link below.