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Ventrilo vs Mumble
Jul. 2nd, 2011 11:02 amDisclaimer: I haven't used Teamspeak since the days of TS2 so I don't know how TS3 functions well enough to comment on it, hence I am sticking to Vent and Mumble.
Voice communications are becoming more and more central to group gaming activities these days, from co-ordinating mass player movements in large scale MMO raids to casual chatting and shooting the breeze whilst idling semi-afk. Some networks and games have an integrated chat function, such as Steam and Eve Online, but in my experience these are hardly ever used owing to time delays between speaking and the message being delivered and connection concerns if the client program it's embedded into hiccups. Third-party VOIP is the most popular because it allows for a large number of people to organise into specific channels where ops can have control over who is and is not allowed to speak and members can switch channels rapidly as required.
The 3 programs I usually come across for this purpose are TeamSpeak, which I wont go further into right now except to say that it's fairly similar to Ventrilo, Ventrilo and Mumble.
As expected of anything where there is a choice for gamers, the debate about which program to use is ever-ongoing. In my observation, the people who consider themselves to be at the top of their game swear blind that Mumble is the only way forwards and look down their noses at non-Mumble users. I'd like to unravel the reasoning behind it.
Personally, I have installed and used both Ventrilo and Mumble clients, though I lack experience with hosting servers and so any advantages or disadvantages relating to hosting are not clear to me.
Purely from a client user perspective, I found Mumble to be extremely annoying, difficult to customise and aggressive about taking control of my system's sound settings as and when it pleases. I couldn't find out how to alter the settings relating to an individual in the channel (for example to boost one person because they are too quiet), the automatic setup got my microphone settings completely messed up and there's no audio cue to let you know when it's begun/finished transmitting if the mic is not running open. It's entirely possible that Mumble does in fact have the ability for these various things and I haven't found it yet after some extensive looking, which doesn't help the case for the program much if one can't even find these options. My experience of Ventrilo has been the complete opposite with little hassle and ease of use.
Purely from a presentation point of view, Ventrilo appears and functions in a more casual manner with Mumble opting for a raw and exposed internals view, perhaps as an indicator of the target audience it's aiming at: i.e. those who consider themselves computer gaming elite. User-friendliness is for scrubs.
So my big question is this:-
What's so great about Mumble? What am I missing?
Voice communications are becoming more and more central to group gaming activities these days, from co-ordinating mass player movements in large scale MMO raids to casual chatting and shooting the breeze whilst idling semi-afk. Some networks and games have an integrated chat function, such as Steam and Eve Online, but in my experience these are hardly ever used owing to time delays between speaking and the message being delivered and connection concerns if the client program it's embedded into hiccups. Third-party VOIP is the most popular because it allows for a large number of people to organise into specific channels where ops can have control over who is and is not allowed to speak and members can switch channels rapidly as required.
The 3 programs I usually come across for this purpose are TeamSpeak, which I wont go further into right now except to say that it's fairly similar to Ventrilo, Ventrilo and Mumble.
As expected of anything where there is a choice for gamers, the debate about which program to use is ever-ongoing. In my observation, the people who consider themselves to be at the top of their game swear blind that Mumble is the only way forwards and look down their noses at non-Mumble users. I'd like to unravel the reasoning behind it.
Personally, I have installed and used both Ventrilo and Mumble clients, though I lack experience with hosting servers and so any advantages or disadvantages relating to hosting are not clear to me.
Purely from a client user perspective, I found Mumble to be extremely annoying, difficult to customise and aggressive about taking control of my system's sound settings as and when it pleases. I couldn't find out how to alter the settings relating to an individual in the channel (for example to boost one person because they are too quiet), the automatic setup got my microphone settings completely messed up and there's no audio cue to let you know when it's begun/finished transmitting if the mic is not running open. It's entirely possible that Mumble does in fact have the ability for these various things and I haven't found it yet after some extensive looking, which doesn't help the case for the program much if one can't even find these options. My experience of Ventrilo has been the complete opposite with little hassle and ease of use.
Purely from a presentation point of view, Ventrilo appears and functions in a more casual manner with Mumble opting for a raw and exposed internals view, perhaps as an indicator of the target audience it's aiming at: i.e. those who consider themselves computer gaming elite. User-friendliness is for scrubs.
So my big question is this:-
What's so great about Mumble? What am I missing?
