Gizmo chat day at Puppy

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smokey01
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WengoPhone

#21 Post by smokey01 »

Lobster et all,

Last night I tested Wengophone:

http://download.wengo.com/wengophone/re ... 86.tar.bz2

What I did!

I booted puppy 4.00 from a clean CD. pfix=ram

Installed Wengo in the root directory.

I was impressed, the program worked out of the box. It was a zipped file not a pet package.

It was quite intuitive and worked well although I did have a couple of lockups when adjusting some settings particularly in the sound and video areas.

The video and sound worked without any adjustment. The video however, was not very good, low quality and a little slow to respond.

It also appeared that only three could be involved in a conference call.

It did't get a chance to test the IM capability but it had an area where this could be setup.

The other draw back is it's size, 24M, similar to Skype.

There were some features that I believe were better than Gizmo but in my opinion Skype is still leading.

Skype 8/10
Wengo 6/10
Gizmo 5/10
Jabbin ?/?

Lobster how did Jabbin perform?

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smokey01
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iVisit

#22 Post by smokey01 »

I mentioned iVisit the other night in the conference. I often used this quite a bit before I dumped Windows. It's a very neat video conferencing package, small and fast. From memory about 2M I think.

http://www.ivisit.com/index_classic.html

It has some very nice features and easy to used once you know how.

Unfortunately it is proprietary and isn't compatible with open packages.

The sound and video quality is awesome

The other problem is it is only supported on Windows and mac platforms.

In the past one of the developers said they were considering porting to Linux but apparently that hasn't happened. The last time I used it must be at least two years ago.

It's one of those packages where you get the basic package for free and to get the plus version you pay an annual subscription. I'm not sure how much it is now but it was about $US35 a couple of years back.

I might re investigate.

Smokey

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Lobster
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#23 Post by Lobster »

Lobster how did Jabbin perform?
Have not tried it yet. :o
Anyone got jabbin working? How did you get on? 8)

Gizmo I would rate as more viable for Puppy than Skype because people are able to use it over dial up. The voice mail facility has a lot of potential. Developers can leave a message and I am wondering if a central 'depository' of messages might be accessible by a group - a sort of group answering machine . . . 8)

I notice that already regular users of Skype and Gizmo are leaving both packages open - I am starting to do that . . .

There are other VOIP software including Twinkle and Zioper http://www.zoiper.com/

However we need something smaller and more efficient. Open source would be welcome of course and audio only is fine

I tried ivisit on the Mac and so far have not had any success finding a room with anyone in it . . .

:)
Puppy Raspup 8.2Final 8)
Puppy Links Page http://www.smokey01.com/bruceb/puppy.html :D

mcewanw
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jabbin and twinkle

#24 Post by mcewanw »

Lobster wrote:
Lobster how did Jabbin perform?
Have not tried it yet. :o
Anyone got jabbin working? How did you get on? 8)
The dotpet muggins produced of the last version of Jabbin published installed fine on my Puppy systems (think I tried it on both Puppy 2.17.1 and of Dingo.
With help from muggins I had a go at compiling it myself too (in case a new release came out or I wanted to play with the source code). Yes, it is open-source, that is the big plus it has. It worked fine as an IM to Google Talk, but I never did get round to trying voice; it is supposed to have the same Jingle somethingorother library as used by Google Talk. However, I was playing with Jabbin in parallel with packaging Gizmo, and Gizmo was definitely more polished, and worked, so I gave up on Jabbin for lack of time. Anyway, as muggins reported, if you go to www.jabbin.com it seems to be turning into a commercial VOIP company. You can still download Jabbin from sourceforge, but no development work seems to have been done on it for a long time. It seems to also include lots of code from PSI, which is maybe something else to keep an eye on; if only these projects had bigger teams of developers working on them, they would come up with the goods (like a Mozilla Foundation effort). But until and if that happens they don't seem to fade away sooner or later, and can't thus compete with the likes of Skype and Gizmo.

I also have Twinkle on my system (as compiled by muggins) and it installed and started up fine, but I've never actually used it... Again, Gizmo just seemed to offer more from my point of view (as does Skype of course, though I hate their non-open protocol model; reminds me of Microsoft practices). Twinkle may work very well (but doesn't have inbuilt IM chat as far as I remember, or at least not jabber compatible) but doubt it is used very widely (I may be wrong there). Don't know if they offer voice conferencing. I think Gizmo has lots of potential; most issues with sound are probably to do with the way people have sound set up on their system, more than it has to do with Gizmo I think (Lobster sounded clear as a bell to me, so gizmo works really well on his system). Afterall, the protocols used in Gizmo are pretty standard, so I find it hard to blame them. If Skype sounds better (which I don't know), I guess that means they are using some proprietry codecs of their own which work really well, but that is hardly a solution for longterm interoperability.

mcewanw
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Re: WengoPhone

#25 Post by mcewanw »

smokey01 wrote:Lobster et all,
Last night I tested Wengophone:
http://download.wengo.com/wengophone/re ... 86.tar.bz2
I really must try wengophone. I did download it at the same time I first downloaded Gizmo, but I think I may have downloaded the older "classic" version, because of the smaller download size. I'll have to check, I can't remember which machine I copied it to!

Though wengo itself seems to be a big commercial company, the software itself still seems to come from an open source foundation, so it has to be an attractive alternative to both Skype and Gizmo. I read something by muggins talking to Newcrest on one of the puppy threads a while back, which seemed to suggest wengo voice quality wasn't so good, but I guess it deserves a try. Pity about its size; that is the drawback (though people seemed to be happy enough using Skype even though it is also enormous). Of course if it does limit conference calls to only a few then it won't be so useful. Gizmo's voice email seems to be one of its killer features; does wengophone offer that (I didn't notice when I had a quick check of its features). It does use open protocols and offers jabber IM and so on, so I'm certainly curious.

Alas, I'm busy as hell now. I really am in the process of moving country and time is running out, so I doubt I'll get round to testing wengophone for a while. Maybe it could have unnecessary optional stuff cut out of it (like I did with gizmo mini), but at 20 odd MByte to start with, an awful lot would need cut out to compete with that gizmo... (and video isn't such an essential for most people; nice to have now and then though).

The problem with gizmo and wengo and skype is just how commercial their services are. They are fine just now, but you can't help wondering when they are going to start limiting free services and charging for much of their functionality (voice mail in gizmo, for example, how long will that be free for I wonder...)

Ah... according to wikipedia spiel, wengophone won't work on dialup (or do the just mean the video part?)

mcewanw
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command line voice over ip possibility?

#26 Post by mcewanw »

Here is something that looks very interesting to me. If this could be made to work, maybe someone could even write a simple gtkdialog or similar frontend to it?

http://www.opensourcesociety.org/2008/0 ... for-linux/

Get it from: http://www.pjsip.org/

and see this page for the console program "Pjsua" that seems to do it all...
http://www.pjsip.org/pjsip/docs/html/pa ... amples.htm

I think this is a job for muggins!

Then I'll add it to foksyf Eye R too... for the blind/visually impaired VOIP is obviously a winner and a commandline solution a must.

Seems to be pretty easy to use too...
http://www.pjsip.org/pjsua.htm#basic

Oh no, I almost feel like trying it now, and I can't really afford the time!

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