Anyone have any experience with Teamspeak?

Thaed

I'm thinking of moving away from Skype for my podcasting needs and building a Teamspeak server instead. Has anyone played with this? Any thoughts?

Apreche

I setup a TeamSpeak server back in the day at RIT. Think of it like IRC, but with voice. The only thing with it is that it doesn't have Skype's proprietary streaming audio compression codecs. You have to pick which codec and which bitrate you are going to use. There's none of that graceful automatic bitrate throttling according to bandwidth.

Thaed

Well, I spent many hours today messing with Teamspeak. I think I’m going to blog about this because while I failed miserably, I learned a great deal. I had heard about Teamspeak from Linux Journal. This is an outstanding magazine with lots of very technical and very informative articles. The article in question was actually evaluating using three Linux distros to turn old laptops into servers. The author reviewed Xubuntu, Vector Linux and Damn Small Linux. In trying to get Teamspeak to work (as the author claimed he did) I used Ubuntu, Xubuntu and DSM. This is what took many, many hours.

Ubuntu had a blocked port that I could not circumvent. Xubuntu kept disagreeing with my graphics card and DSM is just fracking crazy. So I’m kinda embarrassed to admit that I ended up using the Windows versions of both the terminal and server. They just worked. It took me two seconds after spending half the day with Linux.

Now here’s the fail part: Teamspeak really is just for gaming or other applications where audio quality doesn’t have to be any better than a cell phone. When it’s working, Skype is the best thing going by light years.

But again, it wasn’t a total waste of time. When you can get things to work in Linux (like Wireshark for example or even Firefox) there is a great deal of satisfaction in that. My flagship Ubuntu box is quite stable. I am confident that I could have run Teamspeak on it if I could have figured out how to unblock the port. Alas, I wasn’t willing to spend any more time on it. Now I also want to learn more about Apache and Lighttpd and PHP.

I’m still looking for a Skype replacement for podcasting. I doubt there is one at this point.

Apreche

Unlock the port? Sounds like a problem with the router, not the Linux box.

Did you try cranking up the codec in the channel to a higher bitrate in TeamSpeak to get better audio quality?

Perhaps trying another one of those voice chat solutions for gaming will work. Ventrilo is very popular among the WoW players. I assume you've tried gizmo as a Skype replacement as well. The ultimate free solution really is to setup an Asterisk PBX and have everyone get "real" VOIP. Personally, I'm too intimidated to even try to deal with Asterisk. All other solutions I know of cost mad moneys.

Sail

Ventrilo is popular, but without good reason. The audio quality makes it sound like you're sitting in a cave with a bucket over your head.

VentureJ

Ventrilo is ass, and XFire is ass. Do not use either of those programs, if you were ever wondering.

Cremlian

Ventrilo is popular, but without good reason. The audio quality makes it sound like you're sitting in a cave with a bucket over your head.

I assumed this was the case because it's probably the easiest to just use and probably doesn't take up much bandwidth in it's default use which is for gaming. Who cares about audio quality when you just need to know who to loot and who to rocket?

Thaed

After watching the network traffic on my Ubuntu box, I think I may actually have activated Teamspeak as a server when I downloaded it with the Synaptic Package Manager and that's why the port was blocked. It was already running. The weird thing is that, as far as I can tell, it didn't show up as a running process in the System Monitor. There does not appear to be a GUI interface for the server software in Linux, however, (there is in Windows) so I'm going to have to do some digging to shut it off.

I was able to get Xubuntu working on the other box by putting an old NVidia graphics card in it that I had lying around. See, Scott, sometimes it pays to keep old junk! ;-)

Apreche

Yes, in Ubuntu when you install a package like apache, lighttpd, mysql, or teamspeak it is usually immediately turned on by default. I actually don't agree with this functionality. I think it should ask you if you want to turn it on immediately or not.

Secondly, you should not use the graphical system monitor. Open a terminal and learn to use the ps command. Most often I use it one of two different ways.

ps aux | lessThis way allows me to see every process with lots of information such as CPU and memory usage. I use this when I'm trying to find a process, but I don't know which one.

ps -eH | lessThis command shows a hierarchy of processes. This lets me see which processes spawned which other processes. I use this most often to just get a nice overview of what is going on in the system.

For more information, of course you should RTFM.
man ps
The top command is also useful in this way.
man top

Thaed

/bows to Scott's Linux mastery.

I have several manuals, but I was unfamiliar with this. That's the difference between the hobbyist and the pro I guess.

/goes to play with new Linux commands.

Sail

I assumed this was the case because it's probably the easiest to just use and probably doesn't take up much bandwidth in it's default use which is for gaming. Who cares about audio quality when you just need to know who to loot and who to rocket?

It's not nearly as easy to use as TeamSpeak or Xfire. When I played WoW and used it for the first time, it took me about an hour to figure out how to set it up and get on my guild's server.

And this probably has more to do with the server than the program, but half of the time I would need to repeat something I said or ask people to repeat something they said because it was so scratchy.