Raymond.CC Blog

Bring Back Removed Show My Webcam Feature in Windows Live Messenger

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If you are using the latest version of Windows Live Messenger 2009 build 14.0.8117.416, you may have noticed that the very useful Show My Webcam feature has been stripped off. For many years Windows Live Messenger has two webcam features which is the viewing of webcam without voice and the Video Call. The “show my webcam” feature is very useful especially when either party has a slower connection but still able to see each other. When I compared the amount of bandwidth taken up between a Video Call and Viewing of Webcam, Video Call takes up 30KB/s but the webcam viewing takes up only 10KB/s. I tried disabling speaker and microphone so that it does not transmit any sound but the video call still takes up 30KB/s.

Although speedy broadband connection are pretty common nowadays but the upload speed given by most ISP are still quite low. If you didn’t know, showing of webcam uses your upload bandwidth and watching a webcam uses download bandwidth instead. After researching and testing, I found out that it is still possible to use the Show My Webcam feature.