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VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble
41–50 of 77 posts
Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember what you like. The facts are that sound over landlines was not crisp, and in fact was a train wreck. It's particularly ridiculous that you're complaining about digital lines having a low frequency range . Whatever you remember, it isn't reality.
I remember landlines fondly, it felt like I could hear people better back then. At the same time, I also remember the 4khz cutoff. It was the reason music sucked over landlines. Like if you were listening to music with a friend from highschool over the phone, it'd have no depth and you couldn't understand half of it from lyrics to beats. Hold music was a lot worse back then, these days it doesn't sound near as bad. I…
Very good point – the "landline generation's" ears have aged considerably since the 90s.
On top of that, I think many remember "landline quality" in terms of a relative comparison with potato-quality early mobile phone codecs, analog mobile phones, heavily compressed discounted long-distance calling circuits etc. of the time.
Yes, landlines were better than any of that, but it doesn't mean that they were actually good by today's standards.
Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if it was more of an issue with the mic and/or mic placement on phones? Old landline phones had a large mic right by your mouth, whereas cell phones have little pinhole mics near the bottom of the phone. I feel like I've actually noticed the opposite. My parents still have a landline, although it's basically VoIP (through their cable company) but it's connected to the analog lines in their house. I've notice…
Cell phone audio traditionally only covered 300Hz-3.4kHz before being lossily compressed down to 4kbps (or sometimes higher, depending on network, load in that service area, etc). That is complete shit. Recently, there have been other protocols adopted with greater bandwidth (all the way up to 7kHz, which is still several khz short of covering all the content of speech, but considerably less terrible) and less compre…
Ironically, you've got a better chance of getting acceptable quality on mobile-to-mobile calls these days than when calling from a landline:
The big mobile carriers actually have VoIP interconnects preserving wideband audio, while connecting to an (especially smaller) landline carrier might still involve a circuit switched path (going to the physical location of the area code dialed, too!) that inevitably forces everything through a 4 kHz, 8 bit bottleneck.
Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble
#44> You have to verify downloaded tarballs authenticity to be sure that you retrieved trusted and untampered software.
I'm not able to access the site over TLS, so this is currently impossible. Anyone else have better luck?
(from the installation instructions)
$ [fetch|wget] http://www.vors.stargrave.org/download/. vors-2.3.0.tar.zst
$ [fetch|wget] http://www.vors.stargrave.org/download/vors-2.3.0.tar.zst.sig
[verify signature]
$ tar xf vors-2.3.0.tar.zst
Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can certainly play a number of popular and/or high quality games on Linux, but it's hardly ubiquitous. If you're interested in a given specific game I would say your odds of it having a viable Linux experience are worse than 50/50 yet, and if it's a AAA title I'd say it's closer to 10-25% IME. If not for Valve/SteamDeck this would be even more dire, and many of those experiences are still emulation-based i.e. Pro…
This is simply not true. As someone who has been gaming exclusively on Linux for over a decade I don't even bother checking for support before getting new games anymore because almost all of them just work with Wine/Proton or only need minor workarounds. The only things that do give problems (besides new releases which are promply fixes) are some multiplayer games with anti-cheat that intentionally breaks under Linux…
Here's my report:
1. Overwatch -> works great in Proton, albeit about 20% slower than Windows
2. Factorio -> works great natively on Linux, maybe even better
3. Warframe -> works okay in Proton but crashes sometimes
4. Call of Duty (recent) -> kernel anti-cheat both fails to stop cheaters and refuses to work on Linux
I tried living the Proton lifestyle for about 2 years, from around 2019 to around late 2021. Then I just dug my old computer out, reinstalled Windows 10, and went back to using Windows for games.
Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble
#46This is REALLY important software nowadays imho. I'm old enough to have spoken to people on analogue land lines: the sound was crisp, you could hear small background noises, you could hear someone breathe. Nowadays we usually speak to people on digital lines that are highly compressed (to the extend that is messes with the sound quality), low freq range (no bass, very high sounds) and cut up (without enough sound or…
How old of a landline are you talking about here? Anything newer than (heavily depending on the country, probably) the 70s or 80s or so would have been very likely PCM u-law or a-law at 64 kbps (i.e. 4 kHz audio bandwidth at 8 bit), which is literally a mandatory codec in WebRTC. It would have to be a really old, purely analog baseband line without filters (maybe a local call between offices), frequency modulation et…
Mobile connections are often especially crap, using something much lower bit rate than G.711 µlaw. Even modern landlines use voice activity detection and comfort noise generation instead of just passing through the background sounds.
I've never used WhatsApp to call. I have used decent SIP connections with G.722 Wideband or OPUS. They sound better than the old landlines. Discord sounds better too. Signal, much worse.
I think often the problem is that cell phones really have crappy speaker and microphone placement for calls, as basically nobody actually makes calls on them anymore.
Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble
#47>No GUI requirement. Why would someone need a GUI for voice application? But a fancy real-time refreshing TUI would be desirable. Mumble tends to output no information, sometimes hiding the fact of a problem and that everything stopped working.
Eh why would someone need a fancy real-time refreshing TUI for a voice application? Just write logs to stderr and status updates to stdout like regular people.
Honestly, go a step further. Take microphone audio in on stdin and produce speaker audio out on stdout. Then you can skip ALSA/OSS/jack/pipewire/pulseaudio support and just leave that to the user to compose.
Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble
#48I'm not sure I understand the reason why; for non-browser, you can set up a FreePBX or something in 20 minutes and it will work with any softphone. But if I was to use a chat today, I'd use something in-browser, so based on WebRTC and incidentally peer-to-peer (well, kinda, but voice/video flow will be). So not sure I understand who/what this is for.
Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They intentionally dropped frequencies from the audio signal so that they wouldn't have to carry the data contained at those frequencies. This is why nobody ever sounded like themselves over the phone. I remember switching from early GSM phone to a landline because I like to hear my love breathe
Remember what you like. The facts are that sound over landlines was not crisp, and in fact was a train wreck. It's particularly ridiculous that you're complaining about digital lines having a low frequency range . Whatever you remember, it isn't reality.
Maybe i dont live near you.
Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble
#50> WebRTC-based solutions are insane bloated incredible monsters [...] They work mainly only if you use the same kind of software and codecs, for example Chromium[...] That's just not true anymore these days. I've used WebRTC between Firefox, Safari, and Chrome without any issues. > only if you use the same kind of software and codecs, for example Chromium, that requires dozens of gigabytes of disk space and much RAM,…
libdatachannel[0] is exciting me the most for 'low footprint'. str0m[1] is especially exciting, but you have to be in a device/ecosystem that allows rust.
> only if you use the same kind of software and codecs
With WebRTC I can connect clients with varying support of H264, VP8, VP9, AV1, Opus, ulaw and alaw. WebRTC has plenty of flaws, but 'lack of negotiation' is one of them.