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VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble

vors.stargrave.org

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Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble

#51

Post by cies »

lxgr wrote: post #42
slackwaredragon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goo…

> by today's standards.

Which? Whatsapp call sound shit. Mobile phone calls sound shit.

I did Mumble to get some acceptable quality.

Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble

#52

Post by lxgr »

aftbit wrote: post #46
lxgr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

These days, unless you're on 2G or 3G (if they're even still available in your country), mobile phones will often use AMR-WB or EVS when calling over IMS (i.e. VoIP over LTE or 5G), which are both wideband and considerably better than G.711 (and probably even G.722; while they have lower bitrates, they're also considerably more modern).

The problem is that when calling across networks, the connection might still go over a legacy circuit-switched exchange, and that compresses everything down to narrowband again.

I hope that whoever regulates the PSTN in the US will force a switch to all-IP interconnects at some point, since now we get the worst of both worlds (often somewhat lower reliability due to badly managed VoIP services, combined with potato quality because of a legacy interconnect somewhere between VoIP networks).

All IP could also provide much more efficient routing: Right now, as I understand it, if you're calling somebody with a 212 area code and both you and the callee are physically in San Francisco, your connection might still be routed through some circuit-switched exchange in Manhattan, which isn't great for latency or high availability.

Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble

#53

Post by vel0city »

thfuran wrote: post #35
lhamil64 wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

G.711, the standard encoding for home phone systems since they went digital, is usually filtered at 300–3400Hz as well. Chances are if you had a home phone in the 80s or 90s it was filtered at 300-3400Hz somewhere along the path.

Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble

#54

Post by lxgr »

cies wrote: post #51
lxgr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goo…

> by today's standards. Which? Whatsapp call sound shit. Mobile phone calls sound shit. I did Mumble to get some acceptable quality.

> Whatsapp call sound shit.

Not for me; it's way better than any landline I've ever used.

Not sure what we're doing differently – are you sure it's not your or the other party's speaker or microphone?

> Mobile phone calls sound shit.

Not for me either, at least not when EVS ("HD voice") is used, which is more often than not these days when calling friends/family.

2G connections used to sound quite bad, but since 4G, the limiting factor for me has been the other side being on a landline (mostly for business calls), which usually doesn't support wideband audio.

Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble

#55

Post by vel0city »

cies wrote: post #51
lxgr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goo…

> by today's standards. Which? Whatsapp call sound shit. Mobile phone calls sound shit. I did Mumble to get some acceptable quality.

WhatsApp uses opus for its voice functionality.

The default codec configuration for Mumble is opus.

Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble

#56

Post by lxgr »

Sean-Der wrote: post #50
lxgr wrote: post #37

> 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. [0] https://github.com/paullouisageneau/…

Oh, this looks great! Also thank you for Pion :)

Edit: Woah, I somehow completely missed that Pion does WebRTC media too (I've only seen it in a data channel project I've toyed around with in the past). Definitely add that to my list above, and I can somewhat vouch for it, it's cool!

Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble

#57

Post by lxgr »

Sammi wrote: post #23
thaumasiotes wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm old enough to have spoken to people on analogue land lines: the sound was crisp You're old enough to have forgotten what land lines sounded like. 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.

Old phone signals (Plain old telephone service or POTS) cut off frequencies above 4 khz. You cannot hear the difference between f and s, as these are higher frequency sounds at around 8 to 12 khz. You'd have to say f like in Fred or s like in Steve? Cause you literally could not hear the difference. This is the reason broadband internet (ADSL) is called broadband. Because dial up internet used the POTS frequency band…

Pet peeve: This is why we use "broadband" as a synonym for "fast internet", but we should stop using it like that, since it completely neglects the symbol rate in that equation :)

Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble

#58

Post by [deleted] »

d-z-m wrote: post #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 s…

[deleted]

Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble

#59

Post by someguydave »

d-z-m wrote: post #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 s…

I can see your point about a man-in-the-middle attack on HTTP, but realistically if the the attacker can do the MITM he can probably also figure out how to modify the contents on the webserver, in which case TLS does nothing

Re: VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble

#60

Post by rnhmjoj »

aftbit wrote: post #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…

You've practically described baresip.
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