2006-11-19
Why is VoIP/SIP so hard?
Eric has asked: Why is video conferencing so hard?
Actually, I would extend that: Why is SIP so hard?
It’s far from being easy to find suitable SIP clients which support chat, voice calls and preferably also video calls. Preferably, I would obviously like to find versions of the same client for different operating systems, but I would actually accept any sufficiently stable clients. Currently, my research is focussed on a Windows client, but I will soon also need one for Linux. As of now, the client closest to what I would like seems to be CounterPath’s eyebeam/X-Lite, which supports chat, voice and video, including proper presence support, but it has several problems, the most annoying ones being a nice “little” memory leak (going from 50MB total size to 350MB total size within a few days without much SIP activity) and the fact that it sometimes uses up 100% CPU while putting itself to high priority, which makes it almost impossible to recover from this without a hardware reset.
I’m glad WengoPhone went GPL[*] for their 2.0 version. From what I saw, WengoPhone is quite promissing and the fact that it is now opensource makes it much more likely that it evolves quickly into a stable, portable and usable platform for SIP telephony.
Anyway, if someone knows good SIP clients, which support at least voice and IM/chat and run on Windows or Linux (preferably both), I would surely be interested.
[*] In case anyone wonders like I did: the source for the WengoPhone 2.0 pre-releases/release candidates is available only via a subversion checkout as described in their wiki.
See also Wishlist for lenny… or why debian packaging is considered hard
See also CDBS and kittens
See also About Usability
Permalink
Adrrian Bridgett said,
November 19, 2006 at 12:36 CET (+0100)
I use twinkle and I’ve pretty happy with it. The main problem is just SIP itself – it doesn’t work out of the box with NAT traversal. Add to that the whole host of settings available (particularly on something like Xlite) and you can see the problem.
I hope they add SIMPLE (instant messaging and presence) to twinkle – then we would have an open standard for VOIP/IM/P. It would then be interesting to see how XMPP and SIP compete.
Mika Rastas said,
November 21, 2006 at 13:52 CET (+0100)
I played a little bit with Ekiga a while ago. It seemed to be a working solution, windows port was then beta and I think still is.