Widescreen Gaming Forum

My brother and I have been using XFire, which, when it works, it works well. Lately, it's been so frustrating. Calls always connect but we can rarely hear each other, or one person can hear but the other cannot. WE restart the program, restart the computers, sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. After canceling yet another game night tonight because we're low on time and are so fed up with it, it's time for a change.

What other options are there? Steam voice chat gets very laggy and the sound levels are shocking. I have heard of TeamSpeak, but can we just create a channel for two people and talk to each other or are the channels tied to game servers? Is there a better alternative to it? What do you use??

Help a frustrated brother out.

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TeamSpeak and Ventrilo are popular Voice apps.

Teamspeak if you run your own server is very customizable.
For example here is the Teamspeak Server that my friends and I use.

The visual list there is produced by TSViewer which offers free services for embedding pannels like that into your web page of which updates in real time (well once every 1min).

If you run your own server then it is possible to have as many channels and users as you like.
You can setup registered channels that cannot be changed and you can setup user permissions, you can password the server for private use only also.
Best of all, the channels are not tied to game servers, it is totaly independent.
All this is done via a web interface for the server side.

We have been using this for many years now as have found it reliable, good audio quality, and very easy to use!
I have a dedicated server in a datacenter in the UK and a backup server in the US.
We get good latency times so as not to have toomuch of an impact in game when shouting out commands like BAIL!! when your about to crash a plane or such hehe.

You can host this at home also of cause, although I would recommend the person hosting the server has a reasonable internet connection specially as the users start stacking up, you can of cause reduse the audio quality by changing the channels default codec.

There are also some providers online that host free channels for you to use, along with dedicated paid for services.

Should you like any assistence in setting up a secure TeamSpeak server feel free to give me a shout, as there are a few holes in the server which means it can be hacked.
However with some tweaks to the servers settings you can prevent this.

EDIT:- AussieTimmeh you got PM ;)

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We typically just use steam out of convenience.

But I'd much prefer if we moved over to Mumble. (Or even Ventrilo.)

I did use TeamSpeak in the past but once Ventrilo 3 came out it basically obliterated it popularity wise which made it nearly unusable for larger clans etc. It's still a great choice for a small group of friends though. But at the same time I'd prefer Mumble any day of the week, it's open source, sounds better and has less delay.

+1 to Mumble.

My weekly gaming group started with Steam Voice (crap quality/stability), then moved to Teamspeak (better quality/stability), and finally to Mumble a few months ago. Mumble has the best quality, has been rock solid, is open-source and completely feature un-crippled, and the positional audio is HOLY CRAP awesome. I run a Murmur server on my home connection while also having up to 3 people gaming online and have never noticed a bandwidth/latency issue. The upcoming 1.2.3 release of Mumble has some nice upgrades, one of which is robust stream recording. Great stuff.

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Thanks for all the replies. A special thanks to Delphium for sorting me out - legend. Good times, top dogs.

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i5-2500K @ 4Ghz ° Asus P8Z68 ° GTX670 Windforce OC ° 8GB DDR3 RipjawsX ° 4x Viewsonic VA2703 ° Logitech G15 / G5 / G27 ° Razer Vespula ° TrackIR 5 ° Thrustmaster Warthog HOTAS