Peter, I didn't really follow the previous thread (sorry), but here is my take:
We really need to define a standard for this ASAP. Even if half the client authors never intend to implement voice (and video) we still need a standard for those that do, otherwise we will be stuck with a bunch of clients that can't talk to each other - and then we are really no better than the MSN's and Yahoo Messengers of the world. I say we go P2P. If anyone has doubts, they should download Skype and have a play with it. I think we need to look seriously at STUN as a NAT traversal standard - I believe this is what Skype uses and it seems to work very well. Speex looks cool for an open codec (not that I have looked at it in detail) I think this "Upgrading" from IM to voice is really going to take off in the next few years. I do it a bit already at work with the phone, and it's "Umm...what's your number...ok... *dial*...*ring*...Hello?" It's going to be so much more convenient when you can just click a button in your chat session and start talking to your computer. Voice conferencing would be very nice to have (again Skype just added it) but user-to-user should be the first goal. I suspect something like 90% of telephone calls are between two users. Video (webcams) have a big "wow" factor that currently is only limited by bad NAT traversal. Expect this to take off in the next few years also. Michael > OK, I have to apologize for re-starting this thread but I'm still > catching up on mail from November and December! So... > > https://jabberstudio.org/pipermail/jdev/2003-November/017108.html > > There is a long, long thread starting there. Lots of talk about Speex, > H.323, p2p vs. client-server, and so on. As far as I can see, no > consensus ever emerged. It seems that people want some kind of voice > integration (maybe video too, but I think that's farther out). They want > to do 1-to-1 voice chat and maybe even multi-user voice-conferencing. > They want to be able to negotiate that over Jabber and then go out of > band to do the voice stuff. They want this to work from behind NATs and > firewalls. They don't want to open crazy ports in the firewall (or turn > off the firewall entirely!) in order to get this done. The only message > I posted in that thread pointed out that research indicates people don't > actually upgrade from IM to voice or video all that often (by "upgrade" > I mean something as simple as picking up the phone or meeting f2f, not > necessarily switching from IM to VoIP or whatever). So I still have my > doubts about how necessary or important this really is, but I do hear > the question more and more: "When is Jabber going to support voice?" > > It seems to me that first of all we need to get clear on the use cases > and requirements. Do we want the ability to negotiate telephone-quality > voice chat between two IM users? That seems to be the base case (after > all we treat chat and groupchat differently in Jabber, why not treat > voicechat and voice-conference differently?). [Of course maybe it is > stupid to treat chat and groupchat differently, but we burned that > bridge a long, long time ago! :-)] So how do we negotiate one-to-one > voicechat via Jabber? Is it just a stream initiation profile (see > JEP-0095)? Can we treat this in a similar fashion to file transfer > and send data through a SOCKS5 Bytestreams (JEP-0065) proxy as a > fallback if p2p won't work? Can SOCKS5 Bytestreams handle something like > Speex? I notice in draft-herlein-speex-rtp-profile-02.txt that the > author mentions sending Speex data over TCP: > > This transport type signifies that the content is to be > interpreted according to this document if the contents are > transmitted over RTP. Should this transport type appear > over a lossless streaming protocol such as TCP, the content > encapsulation should be interpreted as an Ogg Stream in > accordance with RFC 3534, with the exception that the content > of the Ogg Stream may be assumed to be Speex audio and Speex > audio only. > > So could we potentially do Speex over TCP using a JEP-0065 proxy (or p2p > as defined in that JEP) for voicechat? I realize that it would not work > for voice-conference and might not be perfect, but is it possible? Just > curious. Again, I'm sorry if we've hashed all this out already -- that > was a long thread to catch up on and I am not deeply knowledgeable about > this voice/video stuff. > > /psa > > _______________________________________________ > jdev mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > https://jabberstudio.org/mailman/listinfo/jdev > _______________________________________________ jdev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://jabberstudio.org/mailman/listinfo/jdev
