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Comment by codefined | Hacker News Reader

Still out goto application for chatting, an exceptional piece of technology. Works on unbelievably awful computers in the worst Internet conditions.

Discord has them beat in terms of improving the quality of bad microphones, but also requires an order of magnitude more bandwidth.

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Discord beat all of them because it doesn't need hosting. TeamSpeak, Mumble, Ventrilo all needs hosting and a lot of people don't want to hassle with that. Skype was the only available alternative for a long time but Discord came along and pretty much won.

I think if Mumble ever had a web client it would be a game changer. I have not used anything other than Discord for voice chat since it came out. Unless at a company setting where other tools are appropriate due to culture.

Mumble web clients exist. They are limited to what the browser allows with respect to TCP and UDP access. So they need some sort of websocket proxy to work.

Another example of why web apps are inherently limited I suppose...

I was implying the voice implementation on the backend should natively support audio streaming to the web. Its nothing new and Discord does it. Hacking it to work is not going to be perfect.

It seems Mumble uses speex as the codec. Not sure how well that's supported by the browsers.

Flash supported Speex I wonder if that’s part of why it’s used

Normally Opus these days. Which is what the web client uses.

* https://github.com/Johni0702/mumble-web

Technically browsers have WebRTC and can do Opus without the emscripten compiled libopus, but I guess the Mumble server won't support WebRTC's RTP stream.

Is Discord profitable or are they still burning up VC to provide that hosting? IIRC they tried to branch into being a game store but it didn’t work out.

We use Mumble and it’s nice to know that our server isn’t going to run out of money and shut itself down, nor will it start logging all our communication to target ads at us.

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