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Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software

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Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software

#41

Post by JaumeGreen »

solarkraft wrote: post #35
mrguyorama wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skype went from point to point systems to routing through a server backend.

Any idea why? Sounds stupid, considering latency losses and increased server costs.

Probably one of two reasons.

1. Control. They would control the medium, an thus have full control over the communication. Maybe even apply wiretapping if needed.

2. Anonymity. P2P usually means that you know the address of the other participants, with a central server you don't get to know their address. Professionals might need this extra layer of protection.

Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software

#42

Post by squarefoot »

emteycz wrote: post #23
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #7

I really appreciate Mumble's dedication to lowering latency. Latency is a silent killer of conversation quality. When it's relatively small, you don't notice it's there, but it makes conversations more stilted because everyone's responses are just a bit less immediate. You chalk it up to the person or situation, rather than the software. I'm not seeing anyone make significant attempts to solve or reduce this problem.…

> To my ears, 2010-era Skype had lower latency than any of the modern VOIP systems in use today (including Skype). Yeah! What happened?

3 letter agencies demanding access to private conversations happened, so this is very likely the result of all traffic being routed in a more centralized and less efficient way.

Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software

#43

Post by ocdtrekkie »

I still regularly record podcasts via Mumble. It's got solid built-in recording with decent options, such as whether to record users individually or as to record the entire chat as one audio feed. Because we have users drop from time to time, having this built-in capability makes it easy for us to have at least two people on recording duty at any given time.

I do take mumble.com up on server hosting, because it's so dirt cheap, I mostly forgot how few dollars I spent on a multi-year subscription for a server. It might cost me a month of Netflix for a year of Mumble.

Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software

#44

Post by dymk »

solarkraft wrote: post #35
mrguyorama wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skype went from point to point systems to routing through a server backend.

Any idea why? Sounds stupid, considering latency losses and increased server costs.

Hole punching through routers. It's hard to generically connect two NAT'd devices directly. It's simpler to route through a central server.

Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software

#45

Post by alyandon »

toastercat wrote: post #30
alyandon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I vaguely recall experimenting with Mumble years ago - my biggest gripe was the lack of support for anything other certificate based user authentication which complicates the common case of "User X would like to be able to access Mumble from multiple machines".

You can export and import certificate files across machines. I've done something like this in the past, and found little issue. I prefer this to something like Discord's centralized account & server system, although I know there should be better alternatives for achieving decentralization.

Right. The problem was is that the majority of my users were non-technical. So I was left with the choice of:

1) picking voip software that supports username/password authentication that they would be familiar with since virtually every other service on the internet works in a similar fashion

vs

2) picking Mumble and trying to explain to them how to import/export their identity certificates for all their owned devices and also explaining that they need to keep the cert handy on a flash drive or store it in the cloud so that they can import it on machines that they might not own

Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software

#46

Post by SendConsoleLogs »

colkassad wrote: post #15

We live and die by Mumble in Eve Online. The hierarchical chat room setup is essential for large fleets.

Funny story, as part of a mega alliance we have had issues with a couple hosting providers blackholing our mumble servers. We have so many new connections when big events happen that they auto-detect it as a DDOS.

Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software

#47

Post by mostlysimilar »

greymeister wrote: post #34
dharmab wrote: post #3

Discord has pretty much completely eaten Mumble's market. Free servers and a way better chat system ate Mumble's use case. TeamSpeak is still used by milsim/flightsim communities because it support plugins which integrate the in-sim radios with the VoIP system. EDIT: Got Vent and TS mixed up

I refuse to use Discord because I don't know how or to whom they are going to sell my data yet. It's possible they go to a subscription model but I doubt it, it seems more likely they'll be acquired by one of the big data brokers at some point.

I felt similarly until I re-framed my expectations. I think of it as speaking in public -- even if I'm in a direct message with a single other user, I imagine it's like sitting next to them in a coffee shop. Probably nobody is listening to me speak, but I won't be surprised if I'm overheard by people. Not a perfect analogy but eh.

For hanging out with people and just having casual conversations I think it's fine. Don't say anything you want kept private. I do think it's unfortunate that people don't consider where their data is going or how it's used on a broader scale, but for those of us who use technology more intimately I think we can afford to make these sorts of decisions. I'm happy with the convenience and the interface and I'm okay knowing that the communications are likely going to end up in the hands of some big marketing company some day.

Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software

#48

Post by Sebguer »

AWildC182 wrote: post #11
dharmab wrote: post #3

Discord has pretty much completely eaten Mumble's market. Free servers and a way better chat system ate Mumble's use case. TeamSpeak is still used by milsim/flightsim communities because it support plugins which integrate the in-sim radios with the VoIP system. EDIT: Got Vent and TS mixed up

I haven't seen vent in half a decade at least. The milsimers mostly seem to use Arma and Squad, the former basing most it's mods/plugins on TS. Not sure what Squad players use though. The flightsim community is mostly moving over to DCS which has its own self contained mod for VOIP [1] but those staying on FSX/P3D seem to use a plethora of other weird applications with VATSIM. [1] https://github.com/ciribob/DCS-Simpl…

Yep, this is right. Arma players stick to Teamspeak because of TFAR [1] and ACRE [2]. I'm not sure of Squad's actual milsim community... I don't think there's any advanced radio mods for Squad? Squad is also not really built for milsimming.

Supposedly the next major release of Teamspeak will be Discord-like, which is somewhat concerning. Discord is apparently also working on a more robust voice API which would allow for some of the same mods to get ported over.

[1] http://radio.task-force.ru/en/ [2] https://github.com/IDI-Systems/acre2

Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software

#49

Post by reificator »

greymeister wrote: post #34
dharmab wrote: post #3

Discord has pretty much completely eaten Mumble's market. Free servers and a way better chat system ate Mumble's use case. TeamSpeak is still used by milsim/flightsim communities because it support plugins which integrate the in-sim radios with the VoIP system. EDIT: Got Vent and TS mixed up

I refuse to use Discord because I don't know how or to whom they are going to sell my data yet. It's possible they go to a subscription model but I doubt it, it seems more likely they'll be acquired by one of the big data brokers at some point.

Their model is to sell video games, and that has been clear for years before properly announced.

That doesn't mean they can't also sell your data, but if your root concern is where they're getting their revenue, game sales is where.

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