Thanks for all the tips, folks. I finally ended up downloading Speak Freely for Linux, getting my brother to get the Windows version and tried out chatting. We chatted for about an hour, with no major problems. The issues I noticed were:
- Voice is delayed by something like 2-3 seconds each way. I wonder why, since the packet ping time is quite low (by dial-up standards) - My bro's computer wasn't able to handle full duplex very well when both of us were speaking simultaneously. Well, it's Windows and who knows what the driver for the card is written to do? Apart from that we could keep our mikes open with no noticeable loss of quality. - Whenever fetchmail would start up to download my mail the remote voice would start breaking up -- contention for bandwidth on the link. I solved the problem by either not listening at that time <g> or, if it was important, telling him to hold on for a few seconds. Connecting was a breeze: just give the IP/hostname of the remote computer and Speak Freely will start transmitting. You have to run the receiver program seperately on the Linux command line (or automatically through the GUI -- see under) to play recieved voice. I haven't yet investigated a way to receive from only one host at a time, though I think that should be possible with the Busy Signal option. In summary, Speak Freely with the default GSM encoding works quite well for informal chatting over a dial-up link. I've tried it to the US and to Canada (at early mornings/late evenings) and faced no significant issues. Speak Freely also support conferencing, a user database and data encryption (if you're likely to be discussing state secrets over the 'net... I was chatting about my niece's birthday, etc, so didn't feel the need for encryption ;-) I've tried IDEA encryption and the CPU bar on my PIII/500MHz/512MB secondary cache didn't even blink with both encryption and GSM encoding going on simultaneously. Speak Freely is available for Windows from: http://www.speakfreely.org/ and for Linux/Unix from: http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/unix . Apart from the features above, it also supports an answering machine, echo mode (for testing -- there's an echo server in Switzerland too which you can use to test your setup) and ICQ interoperability on Windows. The Linux version is command-line, but there's a contributed Tcl/Tk GUI wrapper (xspeakfree) which is what I use. Anyone who wants to chat at non-peak-traffic times can send me a mail, or a Yahoo message to kandalaya. If I don't reply to the message, it means I'm on SMS (message coming to the phone), so either wait or try later :-) Regards, -- Raju >>>>> "Raju" == Raju Mathur <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Raju> Anyone tried doing voice over a slow (28.8) dialup? Is it Raju> possible, and if yes, what encoding should one be using? -- Raju Mathur [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kandalaya.org/ It is the mind that moves _______________________________________________ linux-india-help mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-india-help
