[PLUG-AV] Mumble: voip client for "gaming"

[James Bromberger]

Hi all,

One of the items I wanted to improve upon for video production was to
ensure that the camera operators, audio mixer (if present) and vision
switcher (operating DVswitch or similar) could communicate effectively.
Hence you can tell cam op #1 "zoom to a tight shot now", and then "keep
stable, you're live".

I mentioned Teamspeak, and Nick pointed me at "mumble", an open source
equivalent.

Mumble uses the excellent Speeks codec to encode high quality voice in
the smallest possible bandwidth; not that we'll be short of bandwidth in
a LAN environment. Nick and I tested this last night with a mumble
server I set up on my home file server, and it was a little iffy over
the WAN (and on WiFi). We didnt have proper head sets, just normal audio
headphones, so microphone pic-up was not optimal.

Mumble is the name of the client, and the server is called murmur. It
supports a text chat as well as voice, but in our scenario text chat is
not that useful for the cam ops. However, if someone does send you a
text chat, it the mumble client supports text-to-speech, so it will read
you the message!

Mumble also supports transmitting only if you're talking (by analysing
the audio and having thresholds it detects as silence), or push-to-talk,
or continuous transmit. Since I imaging that most conversation would be
a whisper, we'll have to see what works.

Mumble clients are available for Windows, MacOS and Linux.

It seems that mumble has "channels"; but the documentation is a little
lacking. I dont know if you can organise people into different channels,
for example, camera operators and vision switcher in one channel, and
the on stage presenter and the director in another? By default, you chat
in your own channel, but if you need to you can connect to another
channel and give a message???? More playing required.


  James

-- 
Mobile: +61 422 166 708, Email: james_AT_rcpt.to