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by mgillett 4938 days ago
Really like the concept and the product feels great. I'm curious as to why voice chat was not included though. Is that planned in an upcoming release, because it seems like a pretty big setback. You may not be fighting over a single cursor anymore, but you're still fighting for control, and it's hard to coordinate that without talking to one another. I don't want to have to use up additional resources by entering a Skype chat either.
3 comments

I'm a co-founder/dev at PowWow. VoiceChat is going to be in the next major release. We already have system audio being ogg/vorbis'ed to you so its not a question of expertise but simply time allocation. I completely agree that whenever we have PowWow'ed, we would have a active skype session since that's much easier than chat. That's also what a alpha release is supposed to be - to gather your inputs! So if everyone agrees that Voice chat is a must have it'll definitely be there in the general release!
Have a look at Opus, another free audio codec that provides lower latency (~22ms) and better quality than Vorbis.

It also scales down to low-bitrate speech, but I doubt you need that for your application.

Yup - we are actually using webRTC under the covers for video/audio RTP and webRTC itself uses Opus (or recommends) so we'll probably be switching to that for audio chat when we go that route. Thanks!
Do you have experience in using Opus for something else than speech? I'm currently in a project that deals with audio streaming and I've been exploring my options. Would love to hear about your thoughts!
Additional resource would go to their homebrew implementation as well.

Not worth developing for an MVP, in my opinion.

I'd guess that voice chat is a completely different expertise than this.