[plug] Voice over IP

[Bernard Blackham]

On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 04:18:17PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> >Sorry thats all OT though. Search for H.323 on google/Linux.
> 
> Consider GnomeMeeting. I hear its quite good (plan to try it m'self), 
> its standards-compliant and interoperable with MS NetMeeting if you need 
> to talk to windows users.
> 
> Apparently the H.323 protocol it uses can use various codecs with 
> bitrates of 24kbps -> 128kbps depending on what quality etc you want. 

If you use the speex codec (http://www.speex.org/), then you can
achieve stupendous compression ratios - speex was designed for VoIP
applications, and can do telephone quality (8000Hz) at about 2kb/s
or less! So it's barely strains a 56k dialup, and its probably
usable over 33k dialup too.

I'm using speex at Linux.conf.au to encode the audio from the
presentations at 16kHz, and getting about 3-4kb/s - with which you
can fit about 50 hours of speech onto a CD! Very handy! Anyway,
thats getting OT. Gnomemeeting will support speex, as will LinPhone.

Cheers,

Bernard.


-- 
 Bernard Blackham -- bernard at blackham dot com dot au
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