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Re: [LUG] Survey

 

On Mon, 4 Jan 2010, Neil Stone wrote:

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I would like peoples opinions please

http://www.dcglug.org.uk/drupal6/?q=node/12

The plan is to maybe have a mechanism by which people can make a voice
call to a conference system and people can then chat, like IRC only
without having to have an IRC windo open to keep up with the conversation.

Intersting idea, but how many people actualy use the IRC thingy? I think I've only connected to it once...

And VoIP is great (which I'd obviously say ;-) but my fear would be that there might be a few (dozens?) people who just connect and sit there with their PC's streaming silence all-day long... Which someone hosting the conference would have to absorb (and possibly pay for) as asterisk doesn't yet support silence suppression, however there are other conference bridge platforms which may...

Using G.729 (or another low-bandwidth codec), is a possibility, but the conferrence bridge software has to decompress it, mix it, and re-compress it which requires either CPU grunt or a hardware accellerator card. Then there's the issues of supporting patented codecs... (G.729)....

And having participated in many conference calls, they're frankly a PITA to manage )-: You must have a good headset and noise cancelling microphone, or posh speakerphone with local echo cancellation, otherwise the qudio quality for the others becomes seriously bad.

So intersting concept, but I'll vote no as soon as I can work out how to login to the thing.

Gordon

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