I recently acquired Call of Duty 4, a rather engaging FPS (first person shooter, for those of you not hip to the lingo) and was invited to join a few friends who get together to play online. In order to stay in touch while playing, they enlisted the help of a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) program called Ventrilo. Within minutes of downloading, I was up and talking with the other gamers in the group. Let me tell you, it’s much easier to coordinate an attack when you can talk to your teammate group without having to stop and type back and forth to one another.

Acquisition and Installation

I was directed to the Ventrilo home page, where one can grab windows versions of the Ventrilo client in 32 and well as 64-bit. Also available is a MAC version, provided you’re running at least ver 10.3 of OS-X. A Linux flavor is in development. The client is about 2 and a half megs, the server, since it lacks a Graphical User Interface, much lighter at 540K or so.

Unlike Skype, the 800-lb gorilla of VoIP, Ventrilo is much smaller and not totally dependant on a central, commercially-controlled server, at least for the casual user. This gives the users more control over things, obviously, but does mean that one of the chatters will have to download and host the server software, also available at the above page. There is detailed setup instructions on the Ventrilo site for both the client as well as the server. The server comes with default settings sufficient for most users, but any tweaking needed requires knowledge of command-line interfaces, so hosting of the server should likely be left to a more advanced user. They’re shooting themselves in the foot here, a GUI for the server-side would make the entire system more user-friendly, and much more likely to bring in some bucks from the average computer user.

The client-side software, on the other hand, requires almost no setup other than plugging in your headset or microphone, and pointing the client to your sound devices, all explained in the setup instructions at the above site.

Features and Use

The bandwidth requirement is quite low, even with sound quality comparable to your average cell phone. Only 3K per voice stream is required, so even on a dialup connection, use of the Ventrilo client is possible. Once I set my input and output devices, I was ready to go. I had to mess with the volume and amplifier controls for a bit since was alternating between the other people not being able to hear me, and blowing out their eardrums. Don’t forget to check your sound settings in Windows, my microphone control was set to “mute” which kept me quiet for a bit while THAT was puzzled out.

There is a huge list of features. The server itself can be either open to anyone who has the connection info, or password-protected. Once connected, there can be multiple “channels” for separate conversations, private chats, or set up for specific topics. These channels can have many options applied to them, such as password protection, transmit time limits, muted channels and other advanced options.

Transmitting can either be voice activated or you can specify a push-to-talk button. Events such as people connecting or disconnecting can be can be announced by WAV files or Text-to-Speech notifications. There is also IRC-style text chat capability, useful for private conversations and more. The Interface can be set to emulate your Operating System theme, or colors can be manually set. The configuration of the window is widely configurable as well, with a wide variety of setting from max info to minimum screen usage, including a ‘minimize to tray’ feature, something I always look for in an app that’s likely to be open for a while, but the interface isn’t constantly needed. A key-binding editor is also ready for action.

Both the server and client are cross-platform compatible. OS-X users can talk with Windows users, and soon Linux users can join up, too.

The freeware license permits up to eight clients to connect per server, sufficient for most uses. If you have more people than that in your group, you’re going to have to pay. It’s not horribly expensive, and large gaming groups, for example, would have no trouble coming up with, say, 15 usd for a 50 user server through a Ventrilo host service like Nation Voice. There are hosting companies that will ‘rent’ Ventrilo server throughout the world.

I honestly don’t know why I didn’t jump on the VoIP train before this, my mind is ablaze with all the things I can use this for!!

Uninstall and Resource Usage

Ventrilo has a delightfully small footprint, so can be run in the background while whipping the most out of your machine during an intense gaming session.

Uninstall was via an included uninstaller, and was quick and clean. A folder was left behind with a couple small files, quickly deleted.

Pros: Small and quick, Free, client quick and easy to set up.

Cons: Limited to 8 users, server setup could be reserved for geekier individuals.

Conversation Tags: VoIP, Skype, COD4, software