Seeking Low-Resource Utility for Quality Voice Conference

[luciddreams]

Hello, I?ve been playing a lot of online games with my friends, and we like to voice chat while we play. The pro is that it makes our online experience more intense; the cost?FPS (and maybe ping).

So, I am looking for a low-resource program for quality voice conference with support for at least 3 people. MSN allows no more that two people. Skype gets an A for quality, but an F- for low resources. While I have ICQ lite, since none of my friends use it (yet) I cannot evaluate its performance. Thus far, we have been using Yahoo! Messenger.

Just looking for some recommendations!

 

[Crusty]

Ventrillo
TeamSpeak

Both are great

 

[luciddreams]

Excellent! I signed up for Ventrilo server--should be active tomorrow.

Most of us are broadband users, but some of us still use dial-up. Curious, what is the highest codec and/or sample rate that would not noticeably affect the lag of a dial-up user?

 

[Malak]

Eh, probably pretty low. Voice on dialup can suck if you are playing a game too. Dialup has no bandwidth at all.

 

[luciddreams]

Almost setup!

While only one of us uses a modem, I reason the codec will affect him the most. Curious, will there be any real noticible difference in ping/lag in gameplay between the following two codecs for a modem user?

GSM 6.10 (8000 Hz, 16 bit) 1625 bytes/sec
GSM 6.10 (11025 Hz, 16 bit) 2210 bytes/sec

 

[luciddreams]

...or between

DSP Group TrueSpeech (8000 Hz, 16 bit) 1056 bytes/sec, and
Lernout & Hauspie (8000 Hz, 16 bit) 600 bytes/sec

...and I am assuming the more bytes/sec the higher the quality and the more overall performance will suffer, though I am unsure if certain codecs are in general superior even at lower bytes/sec.

 

[luciddreams]

Acutally, I discovered an option in the Ventrilo Utility were I could test each of the codecs. DSP Group TrueSpeech (8000 Hz, 16 bit) 1056 bytes/sec is the lowester bandwidth codec that provides acceptable voice quality. I think that's what we'll go with!