Quite some time ago, a small gaming community I manage began using Skype to voice chat with. We quickly found, however, that Skype was rather heavy on resources and not entirely as well suited to conference calls as the company makes it out to be. In particular, 3 or more callers often resulted in “beat boxing” (audio jitter) while running any sort of intensive game.
So we moved to Ventrilo, but unfortunately the free version only supports up to 8 users at a time and our small clan was rapidly outgrowing this limit. When I shell out quite an amount every month for dedicated servers anyway, I wasn’t about to pay an authorized host for hosting so I decided to see about becoming one. Thus far, Ventrilo’s licensing department has pretty well ignored me – maybe they don’t plan on taking on any new authorized hosting partners?
We eventually found TeamSpeak, which is sub-standard software but free for non-profit hosting. We were happily using this for quite a while, and I eventually became an authorized TeamSpeak Host. However, TS2 has gone over a year without any sort of a new release. The quality of voice still sucks, the software’s buggy and any time any sort of improvement is mentioned on the forums the basic response is “TS3 is coming soon!”. TS3 has been coming for too long now.
Finally, my good friend Terry stumbled upon some GPL software called Mumble. Mumble is quite buggy (but then again TS2 is not without it’s bugs) and doesn’t traverse firewalls well (seriously, just enable TCP mode – you won’t notice the extra latency and it’s not worth tearing your hair out to make UDP mode work) but it’s free. Dual-licensed free, which is absolutely awesome in my opinion because I’m not a huge fan of the GPL.
Sabrienix can host Mumble Servers for profit without paying royalties to a company that’s going to take my money and ignore me. No, in fact development on Mumble is quite active (which is good, because the bugs mentioned above will likely be ironed out soon enough) so I’ll probably end up donating a portion of the profits to the group because after all I’m not paying a fortune for royalties so the money might as well go somewhere useful.
I’ve started working on a Mumble Control Panel for our clients, because the Murmur Server by default doesn’t include one and it’ll make things a lot easier for prospective clients to manage everything they need to.
On the whole though, I’m really impressed by this software. I probably would never have found it if Ventrilo would have answered me, but I’m really glad I did and I look forward to what’s coming in the future from the group.