Skype is a fan-favorite video and voice calling app, and recently transitioned into screen sharing. While it isn’t the best for the former, there is still room for improvement! Find out how you can dramatically improve screen sharing in Skype with this hack.
Skype continues is undoubtedly popular when it comes to carrying out video/audio calls, and screen sharing on a number of OSes. Extending its reach to Mac, Linux, and Windows, the program continues to grow on smartphones and tablets too.
While Skype’s screen sharing is hit or miss compared to other solutions, you can make your screen sharing experience better by removing the FPS limit set by the program using a little trick. This guide covers how to do so for Windows, but the process should be the similar for the other desktop OS’s, as long as you follow the later steps. On Windows, this guide works on any Windows after Windows 7 and on x86 / x64 OS too.
As a pre-requisite, you only need to make sure that Skype is NOT running on your system. Right-clicking the icon in the system tray and clicking on “Quit” should suffice.
Also read: How To Record Skype Calls
Step 1: To start this guide, you need to press Windows Key + R to bring up the Run box. In this box, you need to type in “%Appdata%” as shown below:
Step 2: When you do so, a new folder by the name of “Roaming” will open, in this folder, look for the “Skype” folder.
Step 3: Now look for the folder with your username as the folder name and open it:
Step 4: When you have opened the folder, look for the file, “config.xml” double-clicking on it will open up WordPad by default, but you can also right-click on it and use “Open with” to open it with the word processor of your choice.
Step 5: When you have config.xml open, press CTRL + F and type in “Video“. Right under the device, which is your webcam, you will see <FPS> </FPS> tags. The default value can vary, but is mostly 30/60 FPS depending on the quality of your webcam.
Make the new value “999” as shown below:
Step 6: Once you have done so, simply Press CTRL + S, which is the hotkey for saving and you will have removed the FPS cap that was prior being imposed on Skype.
While this will give you better video quality, do keep in mind that there could be some minor bugs along the way such as screen tearing or lack of vertical sync. Even though I didn’t encounter either in my testing, you should see for yourself if the guide benefited you or not. If you feel otherwise, you can reverse the order of the steps, and revert the pertinent value back to 60.
If you want to carry this out on other OSes, you only need to find the config.xml file. While I do not have any knowledge on how to do it for those OS nor the location of the config.xml file for each, Google will be a great help to you!
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