Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Specialty Hosting and Markets : VOIP etc : Voice hosting market - Vent, TS, Mumble, etc.

[TalonKarrde]

So, with Ventrilo licensing being pretty much impossible to get these days, that leaves people interested in offering voice hosting with the choice of reselling from a licensed user, or selling an alternative such as TeamSpeak.

Now, a more recently introduced program is Mumble - has anyone had any experience using it in a commercial environment? There aren't any control panels or anything of that nature, though according to the webpage, the dbus rpc should make it fairly easy to develop one. It also has some nifty looking features like positional audio.

I've only played around with it a bit, and it is sort of rough around the edges, but it looks promising. It's also licensed under the GPL, so selling servers commercially won't incur any licensing costs.

Since the (current, at least) market for voice programs such as this is pretty much wholly composed of gamers, who are a bit more forgiving of their programs being a tad harder to use, do you think Mumble might be ready for the prime time? Anyone actually using it? I think that with a bit of work for a web control panel, it could be a viable alternative to Vent or TS, with lower overhead costs.

[BrianFarrell]

I came across Mumble in its earlier stages a few months back and played with it for a few days. It was a solid program back than, I'm sure its much better now.

As for its ability to break into the current voip market, I imagine a lot of it would depend on clientside CPU and memory use compared to the established hosts (Vent, TS).

[TalonKarrde]

I'm not really a "hardcore" gamer anymore, though I still play, and I'm not sure I, or anyone else I played with, was ever too worried about the resource impact of vent or ts on client resource usage. It was always negligible in comparison to the games, etc. I suppose with things like positional audio being added and graphics overlays that usage does go up, though.

One thing that strikes me as a "Hey, that's nifty" feature of mumble is the ACL and channel linking system. In the example provided on their website, it explains how you could split up a "raid group" so that the raid leader and group leaders would be in one channel where everyone else could hear them, but the raid leader would only hear the group leaders, and the group leaders would only hear the people in their group, etc. I'm not sure how useful this sort of thing would be in the FPS/etc market, but the MMO industry is growing quickly, so I could see it taking hold there.

It would be nice, I think, to see a more open program break the stranglehold Ventrilo has on the industry, I think, especially with the lack of licensing fees. I would figure the big gap will be that of features and pricing, with a larger amount of the former, and a lower latter, needed to reach a higher market share.

[tnndotnet]

Well one disadvantage of Mumble, which stopped our development of our commercial hosting is the fact it depends on QT. I have had non stop issues trying to get Murmur to run serverside on a linux server... I finally went thru dependancy hell and came out with an installed copy of QT... then it turns out I had the wrong version? That server is powered off now needless to say. Because the demand for Mumble/Murmur is not that high at this time.

EDIT:

One huge plus for Mumble is the fact that it is open source and free to use... even in a commercial environment.

[TalonKarrde]

Originally Posted by tnndotnet

Well one disadvantage of Mumble, which stopped our development of our commercial hosting is the fact it depends on QT. I have had non stop issues trying to get Murmur to run serverside on a linux server... I finally went thru dependancy hell and came out with an installed copy of QT... then it turns out I had the wrong version? That server is powered off now needless to say. Because the demand for Mumble/Murmur is not that high at this time.

EDIT:

One huge plus for Mumble is the fact that it is open source and free to use... even in a commercial environment.

From my understanding, the static build should run without qt installed - just linked. However, if not, according to the sourceforge boards, it should only require qtcore, so you don't need to install all of x11.

[Ramprage]

Yeah I pretty much wasted a lot of time with Qt trying to get it to work but apparently Mumble won't run without it. Qt is basically X11 bound from my findings. Not everyone has a server in their basement where they can login to X11 - bad choice from Mumble I think.

Back to the drawing board.

[TalonKarrde]

Originally Posted by Ramprage

Yeah I pretty much wasted a lot of time with Qt trying to get it to work but apparently Mumble won't run without it. Qt is basically X11 bound from my findings. Not everyone has a server in their basement where they can login to X11 - bad choice from Mumble I think.

Back to the drawing board.

qt-core does not require a full X11 installation, which is all that's required for Murmur, and you can also download the static release off of sourceforge.

[tnndotnet]

So explain this to me now...

The static release is for QT or for Murmur? Do I need to install qt? Can I install qt-core via yum? It would make life so much easier... I added some repos in my little venture to try and get Qt installed, and that too was the wrong version...

Is there better documentation on installation?

Thanks,

[HOD-Jardin]

Ventrilo are very tight, I don't even know why they still appeal as if they are accepting hosts. I think it's rather misleading on their site.

[TalonKarrde]

Originally Posted by tnndotnet

So explain this to me now...

The static release is for QT or for Murmur? Do I need to install qt? Can I install qt-core via yum? It would make life so much easier... I added some repos in my little venture to try and get Qt installed, and that too was the wrong version...

Is there better documentation on installation?

Thanks,

For Murmur, with the static build, you don't have to compile, or install qt, or anything.

http://sourceforge.net/project/downl...r.bz2&46849317

All you have to do is edit the ini, and then ./mumble.x86 -supw passwordhere

It will create the sqlite files, etc, and then you just run ./mumble.x86 and the server is up and running.

[JonBiloh]

Yep Flagship has closed the doors on additional providers, for that reason we're developing our own VOIP. Should be interesting.

Shame TS2 has .0001% the user base of Ventrilo.

[HOD-Jardin]

Originally Posted by JonBiloh

Yep Flagship has closed the doors on additional providers, for that reason we're developing our own VOIP. Should be interesting.

Shame TS2 has .0001% the user base of Ventrilo.

All we can hope for is the new Teamspeak 3, I’ve heard this is coming out very soon. I’d imagine that it will be around the same quality as Ventrilo.. but who knows!

[Shrapnet|Rob]

Originally Posted by H4U-Jardin

All we can hope for is the new Teamspeak 3, I’ve heard this is coming out very soon. I’d imagine that it will be around the same quality as Ventrilo.. but who knows!

TS3 has been coming soon for 18 months, maybe even longer (trying to be conservative on my guess). Posts on their developer blog do seem to show progress, but nothing since February.

[spacehosting]

They is nothing in voice server hosting in my opinion.

The resources needed these days for voice servers are close to none exsisten.

Gameservers all the way.
Webspace in large numbers.

[XFactorServers]

I got to say mumble is pretty horrible.