Set up audio and video

- Before you start using Skype to make calls you should make sure your audio and video settings are configured properly so others can hear or see you. You should always confirm your settings before making or receiving a call. You don't want to be fumbling around with your settings during a call, especially if it's an important or professional call. Here in Skype, start by clicking this three dot button and selecting settings, and then select audio and video. And here at the top next to camera, if you have multiple cameras connected to your computer, you can choose the one you want to use in Skype. I'm using a surface tablet. So I have both a front facing camera and a rear facing camera, but for Skype calls, I most likely want to keep my front facing camera selected. Once you've selected your camera, you can scroll down to your audio settings. Here next to microphone, you can choose the microphone you want to use. This might be your computer's default built in microphone, or you may have connected a USB microphone, or you might want to use a microphone built into an external webcam you've connected to your computer. Notice as I'm speaking, we're seeing this meter move, and this is telling me the audio levels that are going into the microphone and Skype is actually doing a pretty good job of keeping those levels even. If you want, you can turn this automatically adjust microphone settings switch off and manually adjust your microphone settings. Basically, you don't want the levels getting all the way to the right here. I'm just going to leave it set to auto in this case. Below that you can choose the speakers you want to use to listen to audio through Skype. This could be your devices built in speakers, external speakers, a Bluetooth headset you've paired to your computer, and so on. By clicking the test audio button, you can check if the audio is playing through your selected speakers. (computer dinging) Now, if you don't hear anything, double check to make sure you have the right speakers selected and then on your speakers or headset themselves, make sure they're turned on and not muted. You can close settings, and once you have your video and audio settings configured, you're ready to make a call. Let's try a video call. I'll come over here to my contacts, and I want to get my friend Nick a call. So I'll select his name and here in the upper right hand corner, I could click the phone button to make an audio call over Skype, but in this case, I'll click the video camera icon to make a video call. And I could see myself as a call is being placed. And in a second, there's Nick, Hey Nick. - Hello. - Thanks for helping me out with this. - No problem. - So that's pretty much all there is to making a video call and Skype. We can now both see and hear each other, and we can have a conversation and Skype, anytime we like, as long as we both someplace with an internet connection. So at this point, I want to show what it looks like if we receive a video call, so Nick, I'm going to hang up, but could you call me back in just a couple seconds? - No problem. - Alright. See in a second. All right, so to receive a call, Skype needs to be running and now we can see Nick is calling. Now I could click the phone button if I only wanted to answer with audio or I can hang up if I didn't want to answer it all. But in this case, I will answer with the video button again. And once again, there's Nick. Hello again. - Hey. - So that's pretty much it. We can now just continue having our normal conversation here over video. All right, so thanks again, Nick. - No problem. - All right, we'll talk to you later. Okay, so that's how you set up your audio and video settings. So you can make and receive calls in Skype.