Re: [orca-list] skype replacement

["B. Henry" <burt1iband gmail com>]

If someone has a server, physical or virtual then mumble is a good option. 
If you are 8 or less who wish to chat together at any one time then the free ventrilo server is another 
option, and although like ventrilo not FOS, 
teamtalk is very good as well as text chats are completely accessible, (a bit annoying in mumble), and 
teamtalk has no limit as to how many folks can 
use it at one time assuming you have the bandwith.
SIP clients are more like skype  in the sense that you can both make free calls to other sip users, no need 
to have the same client, and you can sign up 
with any of many SIP to traditional phone providers, i.e. you pay per minute or a fixed rate for unlimited 
calls to connect to landlines or cellphones. 
Some SIP providers are quite expensive, but others have excellent rates, the same more or less as Skype 
rates, but in many cases with no connection 
charge. I can thus make one or two minute calls for a few cents U.S. to many countries. With Skype those one 
or two minute calls cost about a dime more 
because of the connection fee.  You will have to investigate plans with different countries depending on 
where you live and where you call to get the 
best rates if you will be wanting to call phones and not just make internet VOIP cals to other SIP users. 
To call SIP to SIP you can actually call an IP directly, but most people join a network/service where you get 
a user name and use a password to connect. 
Some of these are SIP only, i.e. you can only make free calls to other SIP users who are part of that network 
or another one, and others are the kind of 
VOIP provider mentioned above that allow you to call and receive calls from traditional phones for a price. 
I have an account with an SIP provider where I pay $2 a month to have a phone number for receiving calls from 
traditional phones, and another one that 
is SIP to SIP only as a backup.
There are also a couple of projects that try to be very skypeish, but I know little about their popularity. 
At least one is accessible I believe, and 
was mentioned on this list some time ago, so if you were to search the archives you could find its name. 
Back to SIP: I and many other Orca users use Linphone. It allows for high quality encryption, and has at 
least three interfaces. One is a GTK GUI that 
works well with Orca. My favorite for most things is a commandline interface that works great with speakup, 
the only voice chat/SIP system that require 
no running GUI that I know of. There is also a daemon that can be used in scripts to make automated calls and 
the like. Linphone and many other SIP 
clients do video chats as well as audio, and linphone lets you use a widerange of codecs so it can connect to 
a variety of networks, VOIP systems and 
bandwidth conditions.
Some people have used teamspeak as well, but I have no experience there. 
As for Mumble, Teamtalk and Ventrilo, I've set up servers for all three, and can attest to the fact that you 
do not need to have a lot of sys-admin 
experience to do so. The servers just run once set up, and they do not use of lot of processer cycles or 
memory. Bandwith requirements can very greatly 
depending on the codec/quality you use. 
Teamtalk 5 is the latest release, but if you want lower server bandwidth usage you can install teamtalk4, 
think 4.6 is the last TT4 version, you can set 
things up to use p2p connections.
Fell free to write me off list if you need help or have specific questions regarding any of the software I've 
mentioned.
I will make a sort of anti recomendation as well. Ekida  is a nicely accessble SIP client, and is or at least 
was a part of the gnome project, but it 
does not work well  with many SIP services due to issues connecting, (registering it's called), and had some 
other problems I can't remember at the 
moment. 
 


-- 
     B.H.
   Registerd Linux User 521886


  Pavel Vlček wrote:
Sun, Oct 11, 2015 at 11:22:47AM +0200

> Hi,
> a lot of my friends are using Linux now. Because Skype for Linux is
> older and older and we have some compatibility issues, we want to try
> some skype replacement. Do you know some accessible application, which
> works as Skype, but is accessible and is maintained? We want audio
> calls and chat. I tested Mumble, but I think this is for communities.
> Thank you,
> Pavel
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