Hi Florian, *, On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 3:43 PM, Florian Effenberger <flo...@documentfoundation.org> wrote: > > The current phone conference infrastructure provides a lot of dial-in > numbers. It has its drawbacks, like some countries missing and the web > interface only available in German. However, some other problems are not to > be fixed with that, like > > * time zone > * availability of a phone or local dial-in > * availability of broadband internet
Good thing about mumble is that it doesn't require broadband connection http://mumble.sourceforge.net/FAQ/English#What_are_the_bandwidth_requirements.3F "With top quality, minimum latency and positional information sent, it is 133.6 kbit/s including the IP and UDP overhead. With 60 ms transmission delay, the lowest quality speech and no positional information, it is 17.4 kbit/s (again with IP and UDP overhead). The default quality setting uses 58.8 kbit/s." So even with a modem dial-up, you should be fine. > Setting up an own Asterisk or FreeSwitch server cannot solve all problems > either, as we can not get local dial-ins for a good price. It would cost us > hundreds of EUR per month if we do it totally on our own. I agree - so the ideal solution would just hook both traditional phone-lines and mumble together. That would require one system that can dial in to talkyoo and acts as a bridge to mumble - i.e. a softphone that listen on both and forwards to both. (Well, depending on how well echo-cancellation works, one might need two one-directional systems here. > So, my take for the "basic" conferences is to use talkyoo as we do now, and > try to get more people in by using either Skype, When you mention Skype, you have the same/worse bandwidth requirements > or our own Asterisk. > However, for that to happen, I need *feedback* from those affected by > missing local dial-in numbers whether they can use Skype, or in which > country they are, so we can check for dial-in numbers. For me, it is not just about dial-in numbers. WIth talkyoo system, there is a vast difference in quality in the participants, specifically the volume of the various speakers, one very faint, the other really loud, sometimes lots of background noise,... mumble has a audio-setup-wizard that helps setting up the microphone levels, etc. (although it is not trivial to get the system's microphone settings right on all systems - you must not echo the microphone directly to the speakers for example - and the default gnome-mixer-applet doesn't offer a switch for that, so you have to resort to gnome-alsamixer/another mixer-application to configure it m- similar problems on Windows (probably depends on hardware and the corresponding driver-software) Mumble has the advantage that it also offers visual indication when someone speaks ("red lips" = talking, "grey lips" = user is not talking) - so its easier to follow a discussion when you don't recognize people by their voice, and its easier to not talk simultaneously without noticing (a "loud" speaker cancelling out a "faint" speaker). Additionally, there is the possibility to have written notices (to paste URLs and similar) > My impression is that a lot of people who can dial-in anyways are working on > the topic, but feedback from the affected people is missing. It doesn't help > having Mumble, when colleagues from another country cannot join anyways, as > they have only slow internet. Well, indeed. That's the real dealbreaker here. > So, again, *please*, those who cannot join the conferences, but *want* to > (this is important as well!), *please* give feedback on why and what your > preferred solution would be. If you want to try out mumble with someone, don't hesitate to announce a time when you want to test it - I'm sure there will be someone who can assist/help by joining the channel (after all you cannot test bidirectional communication when you're the only person in the room :-) > That's for the majority of phone conferences. Of course, there will be some > special conferences where something like OpenMeetings comes in handy. I'd not call it conferences.. OpenMeetings is more for presentations, where one person talks and other people are mainly listening. For that it provides the whiteboard (i.e. you can show a presentation and draw on the slides) and also video (but when using those features of course you need the bandwidth again). It relies on flash, and is much more difficult to use compared to mumble (and there is no way (at least not obvious to me) on how to adjust the microphone level, so at least on my system the level would be way too low, people won't hear me...) But again I second Florian's question: Those who are affected by the lack of dial-in numbers provided by talkyoo - what would be the best alternative in your opinion? ( ) Skype ( ) OpenMeetings ( ) Mumble ( ) neither, need regular landline number ( ) other, please specify _______________________ Alternatively, you might point out why a given solution is not a valid alternative (I cannot use xxx because yyyy) ciao Christian -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to steering-discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/steering-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
