Yes, that can be a problem. But if developers who need it would invest money in Mumble instead of all these blob middlewares, it could progress faster.
Mumble is probably the best VOIP solution on the market. The main issue blocking its wider adoption, IMO, is the lack of support for persistent, multi-media friendly, text chat. I've suspected for a while that Discord could be totally replaced by someone duct-taping Mumble and some forum software together.
Yeah, I really think a polished / pre-configurable UI for business could be an amazing thing for Mumble (both for business, "use this binary" and for guilds / gamers ... same thing "use this binary" ... binary carries the config, etc). I consider Mumble like IRC, amazing but a bit raw. Someone is going to take shiny interface to it and make a killing in business.
I doubt Mumble/Team Speak are ever going to be as popular as they were before. But boy do I wish they would.
- Native UI: everything happens instantly
- Lightweight client
- The ability to host your own server
Even initial setup difficulties had an upside. More often than not, those who weren't capable of properly setting things up also weren't the right fit to play seriously/competitively. Such little barriers were a great initial filter for toxic wannabes with short attention span.
I think Mumble as an OSS voice chat project has had its success and has brought some net positives to the ecosystem since its inception. But nowadays, especially since pandemic times, the focus of the technology has moved and newer systems are in place which bring very powerful possibilities to the audio/video conference field.
WebRTC has seen an incredible push and if you only wanted Mumble for its open-sourceness and its use of the Opus codec for low latency, you might be better off by joining a Jitsi room with your friends and enjoying the immense effort that the web browser already brings in matter of echo cancellation and other shenanigans related to conferencing apps, plus the better UI that these kind of projects offer for end users (Mumble's bad UI is a common topic).
On the other hand there is Discord, but it plays in a different league because it is closed-source, VC-backed, and uses some advanced technology like AI-based noise cancelling.
The only bad part of mumble calls for voice come from:
* Where the server is hosted / quality of server
* Poor client UI
The client UI issue is how easy it is to work-around bad audio from other users. It's possible to do, the UI just completely sucks.
User interface and end user fulfillment just aren't great generally for OSS. I think it would take a commons improvement project with either government grants (infrastructure) paying for results AND/OR a university spearheading the development project.
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