[jdev] voicechat again

[Richard Dobson]

> It seems to me that first of all we need to get clear on the use cases
> and requirements. Do we want the ability to negotiate telephone-quality
> voice chat between two IM users? That seems to be the base case (after
> all we treat chat and groupchat differently in Jabber, why not treat
> voicechat and voice-conference differently?). [Of course maybe it is
> stupid to treat chat and groupchat differently, but we burned that
> bridge a long, long time ago! :-)] So how do we negotiate one-to-one
> voicechat via Jabber? Is it just a stream initiation profile (see
> JEP-0095)? Can we treat this in a similar fashion to file transfer
> and send data through a SOCKS5 Bytestreams (JEP-0065) proxy as a
> fallback if p2p won't work? Can SOCKS5 Bytestreams handle something like
> Speex? I notice in draft-herlein-speex-rtp-profile-02.txt that the
> author mentions sending Speex data over TCP:

The two primary use cases I can see are simply two person one 2 one
"voicechat" and more than two people "voice conference", it would seem to me
that "voicechat" can be easily done p2p (similar to filetransfer) just like
we send normal "chat" messages in jabber directly to each other, and it
would also seem to me that "voice conference" is best done using a server
based mechanism just like we use MUC now. I dont see any reason these two
use cases need to be combined into a single solution using one or the other
options (p2p or server), although there maybe overlap in such things as the
media negotiation protocol (which codec to use etc) so that these such
elements can be reused by both protocols. Also "voicechat" and "voice
conference" do seem to be targetted at two different uses, i.e. one to one
chat with your mates (IMO the more common usage, which you can use telephone
use as a good example of the amount of usage of both cases, people use
telephones for one 2 one chats far more than they do teleconferencing, also
conferences are generally planned ahead whereas one 2 one chat generally
happens without much prior planning), just like you would use the telephone
for nowadays, and group meetings like international business meetings,
jabber protocol meetings etc.

> So could we potentially do Speex over TCP using a JEP-0065 proxy (or p2p
> as defined in that JEP) for voicechat? I realize that it would not work
> for voice-conference and might not be perfect, but is it possible? Just
> curious. Again, I'm sorry if we've hashed all this out already -- that
> was a long thread to catch up on and I am not deeply knowledgeable about
> this voice/video stuff.

JEP-0065 is perfect for establishing a TCP connection between two parties
for voicechat, but we might want to consider something to do UDP
negotiation.

Richard