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VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble

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86 points stargrave | 1 comments | 19 Apr 24 05:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.318s | source
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cies ◴[19 Apr 24 09:27 UTC] No.40084765[source]▶
This is REALLY important software nowadays imho.

I'm old enough to have spoken to people on analogue land lines: the sound was crisp, you could hear small background noises, you could hear someone breathe.

Nowadays we usually speak to people on digital lines that are highly compressed (to the extend that is messes with the sound quality), low freq range (no bass, very high sounds) and cut up (without enough sound or when then other party makes more sound the stream is completely interrupted).

And it does not have to be like this! All of this is in favour of the network operator (or centralized chat servers e.g. whatsapp) trying to save some data/money. While many of us have paid for unlimited data!

On top of that much of the conversations are not properly e2e encrypted!

I've used Mumble to speak to people I love over long distance and the quality is just so much better: it's like the analog experience of my childhood. Hearing ever breath, background noise and all in high quality makes all the difference some times.

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thaumasiotes ◴[19 Apr 24 10:35 UTC] No.40085105[source]▶
> I'm old enough to have spoken to people on analogue land lines: the sound was crisp

You're old enough to have forgotten what land lines sounded like.

They intentionally dropped frequencies from the audio signal so that they wouldn't have to carry the data contained at those frequencies. This is why nobody ever sounded like themselves over the phone.

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lhamil64 ◴[19 Apr 24 13:30 UTC] No.40086597[source]▶
I wonder if it was more of an issue with the mic and/or mic placement on phones? Old landline phones had a large mic right by your mouth, whereas cell phones have little pinhole mics near the bottom of the phone.

I feel like I've actually noticed the opposite. My parents still have a landline, although it's basically VoIP (through their cable company) but it's connected to the analog lines in their house. I've noticed they generally sound clearer on their cell phones than they do on the landline.

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j45 ◴[19 Apr 24 13:41 UTC] No.40086723[source]▶
It’s different audio codecs and data connections which can be changed and adjusted.

Voice over mobile data will benefit from a different type of data compression relative to how data packets are handled in a cellular radio vs a wired internet.

The landline service could be as clear or clearer than mobile data, it just isn’t configured to do so in your case. I have seen VoIP setups using a high quality codec and a handset that can use those frequencies.

Phone companies use different setups that compress to their advantage for many more callers.

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1. lxgr ◴[19 Apr 24 18:47 UTC] No.40090609[source]▶
I'd not really call it different packet handling (except for some of the earlier, mostly 2G ones not providing FEC at lower layers and delegating some level of error concealing to the codec, as far as I remember):

The main difference is that the bandwidth available was just much lower, so mobile codecs are compressed more. (Satellite phones take this to the extreme – 2.4 kbps is a typical data rate after compression there!)

But so were e.g. international trunk lines; they squeezed a lot more than one voice channel into 64 kbps using compression, silence suppression etc.

> The landline service could be as clear or clearer than mobile data, it just isn’t configured to do so in your case.

An analog landline has relatively little chance of ever gaining wideband support, since that would require swapping out line cards at the provider, and the trend seems to be to get rid of these entirely (in favor of a VoIP adapter in the CPE).

I think I've once used "HD voice" on a "landline" when calling a mobile phone, but that only worked because my home router was actually doing SIP in the background.