This is a sponsored review
Lets talk about VOIP in-game options. It’s essential - last thing you want to be doing when working on something complicated and time-critical is trying to explain with text communication. Currently I use at least 4 different ways to talk to my teammates when playing games.
- TeamSpeak: the ubiquitous TeamSpeak is the oldest and most reliable gaming VOIP service available. Occasionally laggy and echo-y
- Skype: internet telephony. This gives much better quality voice than TS, but doesn’t integrate well with games
- X-fire: they took IM and made it game compatible. Integrates fantastically with every popular game on the market but voice sound quality is poor at best. Stick to the IM guys!
- Ventrillo: the New TeamSpeak. Skype-like quality, with no lag, and integrating with most games. Downside? Less popular than TS
Mainly these days I’m using TS when multi-player Counter-Strike (4+) because the server is TS enabled, but occasionally I just leave Skype running in the background to my friend and we both jump on the same server. X-fire’s advantage comes in here because you can right-click your friends name and “Join server”.
What about Ventrillo? Well Dallas Xtreme asked me[1] to check out their Ventrillo hosting and I decided to see if it could match my TS experiences. If you check out their site you’ll see a list on the left hand side that shows London, England, Ashburn, Virginia, etc. These are test servers. I chose the London server as my testing ground since it’s close to Dublin here.
Was I impressed? With their server, yes. Voice quality was more than adequate, and lag was non-existent. With the non-server elements, well Ventrillo is a pretty polished piece of software.
Update
Chris has some interesting technical info in the comments section:
I wouldn’t say your experience was exactly typical. Heres the breakdown:
Teamspeak supports a number of quality levels (codecs). It ships with one of the lowest enabled, because it takes up less bandwidth. Teamspeak uses UDP, a connectionless protocol, to send data. This is faster than TCP/IP, but less reliable.
Ventrillo supports a number of codecs also. It ships with one of the highest enabled, because it sounds good. Vent uses TCP/IP, which can cause enormous lag if packets are dropped, but with guaranteed delivery you will always hear exactly what others said.
In summary: Vent sounds better out of the box, but may effect your game performance by hogging bandwidth. Teamspeak may occasionally sound worse, especially out of the box, but will have a much less noticable effect on gameplay.
Here’s my reply to his comment:
Thanks for the detail, I hadn’t seen it broken down as simply as TeamSpeak using UDP, Ventrillo using TCP before.
Regards sound quality vs lag… well I was going to say that that’s an easy one to answer - I’ll take the lower quality any day, but don’t lag me! But on consideration, that’s not quite true - it depends on circumstance.
In a hectic game of CounterStrike, where 1/100 of a second makes a difference then lag is unacceptable, but dropping voice packets is acceptable.
In the slower paced game of World of Warcraft at length discussion of your raid’s strategy is vital, but 1/100 of a second lag is normally dealt with quite well by the game network code.
So on that basis I would go for TeamSpeak with UDP. For WoW I would say that communication quality is more important, thus being more suited to Ventrillo.
Would I recommend dallasxtreme.com? I don’t know. I certainly don’t think you’re going to have any issue with the quality of communications. If I were you I’d first of all check out the test servers, and when happy, take a look at the pricing options and see if you’re happy with the price.
Ratings: overall: 7/10 (quality 8/10; value 6/10 (because their competitors at the low-end are free))
1. (ReviewMe does not require reviews to be positive, these are my true opinions)
I like Ventrilo, but how is their Linux support these days? Last I checked, I had to run it under Wine, while TeamSpeak runs natively.
Hey James,
Good point. I must admit that despite my dislike of all things Microsoft, I continue to use Windows as my gaming platform purely because Linux is not a viable gaming platform at the bleeding edge.
From the Ventrillo tech support forums:
That’s dated 05-30-2005!
I wouldn’t say your experience was exactly typical. Heres the breakdown:
Teamspeak supports a number of quality levels (codecs). It ships with one of the lowest enabled, because it takes up less bandwidth. Teamspeak uses UDP, a connectionless protocol, to send data. This is faster than TCP/IP, but less reliable.
Ventrillo supports a number of codecs also. It ships with one of the highest enabled, because it sounds good. Vent uses TCP/IP, which can cause enormous lag if packets are dropped, but with guaranteed delivery you will always hear exactly what others said.
In summary: Vent sounds better out of the box, but may effect your game performance by hogging bandwidth. Teamspeak may occasionally sound worse, especially out of the box, but will have a much less noticable effect on gameplay.
Hi Chris.
Thanks for the detail, I hadn’t seen it broken down as simply as TeamSpeak using UDP, Ventrillo using TCP before.
Regards sound quality vs lag… well I was going to say that that’s an easy one to answer - I’ll take the lower quality any day, but don’t lag me! But on consideration, that’s not quite true - it depends on circumstance.
In a hectic game of CounterStrike, where 1/100 of a second makes a difference then lag is unacceptable, but dropping voice packets is acceptable.
In the slower paced game of World of Warcraft at length discussion of your raid’s strategy is vital, but 1/100 of a second lag is normally dealt with quite well by the game network code.
So on that basis I would go for TeamSpeak with UDP. For WoW I would say that communication quality is more important, thus being more suited to Ventrillo.
Thanks for your comment.
amd.
We’re sorry that you had technical difficulties. We have a 100% satisfaction rate. We typically do cancellation interviews and have never had a single customer dissatisfied with server performance or lag. As I mentioned to you by email, you lag issues were almost certainly on your end.
DallasXtreme.com quickly refunded the purchase price as soon as we found out you were not satisfied with the quality of service. I highly recommend that anyone interested in purchasing a Ventrilo Server test your connection in any of our worldwide test servers. I’m sure you’ll give our service 10 out of 10!
Perhaps there is some misunderstanding, I did not have any quality problems with DallasXtreme. I’m not sure who you’re referring to as having technical difficulties.
Just for clarification here’s the relevant quote from the review above:
My only criticism of DallasXtreme is that they charge. It’s possible to get a free service of almost the same quality, which will be good enough for 90%+ of gamers. Of course with a free service things like guaranteed quality and uptime will definitely be an issue.
hi
i have a mac, and it’s not working for me.
It says i need speex codec. when i have GSM 6.10,
Its really bothering. I would really appreciate a respnse.
Thank You