Ok, this looks pretty darned cool, using “Festoon“ you can add video to Google Talk, and Skype! I just picked up a new Logitech webcam, and I'm very impressed w/ the quality and advancement of this unit as compared to one I owned a few years ago.

It's 1.3 Megapixels, and while by no means studio quality, it's pretty darned good. It has some cool features too, like face tracking, the camera will automatically adjust to track your face during use (if you want it to). This is nice because you can talk more naturally, and you don't have to keep your head within the camera's field.

I have not yet had the opportunity to try festoon, as I need to get someone else to install it on their version of Google Talk or Skype, but once I do, I'll edit this post. Somebody instal this w/ Skype, or Google, and let me know.

UPDATE:

I used Google Talk and Festoon w/ a friend last night. It worked relatively well. I had spent about 20 minutes w/ another friend trying to get crappy MSN video chat to work, and the audio just was not working w/ MSN. A quick call on skype confirmed that both of us had our audio working, so not sure what's up w/ that.

The Festoon software even includes a bandwidth usage meter, kind of nice to see what is happening when sending and receiving video/audio. I'm impressed for a beta. When this goes out of beta into it's 1.0 launch, I think it will be very solid.

The downside, both parties have to have the software installed, but I guess if it works, it's not that big of a downer. Unlike the crappy MSN client, and all of the stupid winking, nudging, and flash like features that can be purely defined as annoyanceware, festoon is simple, and simply works.

Give it a try!