[Ekiga-list] Ekiga audio codec questions



I and my father recently started using Ekiga to communicate. Both of us are using Fedora 9 with Ekiga 2.0.12 from the Fedora repo. My machine has a 2.53 GHz Celeron D CPU, his is a 1.1 GHz AMD Duron. We started out using the default setup, so both of us were using the wideband SPEEX. My audio sounded good to him, but his was severely broken up. After trying several codecs, we settled on iLBC as the only codec which allows his audio to be reasonably intelligible to me.

First, I had him switch the order of his top two codecs, so the first was iLBC and the second was SPEEX wideband. My own codecs were the defaults. If I called him, then SPEEX was used both incoming and outgoing. If he called me, then iLBC was used for both. It doesn't seem to make sense that which codecs get used depends on who calls who. Is there a reason for this, or is it just a bug? Is there some way for my outgoing audio to be SPEEX, and his outgoing audio to be iLBC, in the same call? So far I have never seen the incoming and outgoing codecs in a given call be different.

Finally we decided that it was best for him to put his codecs back in the original order, but to uncheck the SPEEX wideband. This results in iLBC being used in both directions, regardless of which of us originates the call.

We tried using top to see how much CPU was being used with the various codecs, in the hope of discovering the cause of his choppy audio. The SPEEX wideband and the iLBC each use up something around 60% of his CPU, despite the fact that iLBC sounds much less choppy. I was amazed that processing audio would require this much. Is this an expected amount for a 1.1 GHz CPU, and could it be the cause of the choppy audio for SPEEX?

I know that Fedora 9 has a lot of sound-related issues, and that may have something to do with it. Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about sound on Linux.

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