Skypeing...

[thorfinn]

Glee. After investigating various VoIP options, and not being satisfied with any of them, I heard from rickybuchanan about Skype. It's not an open source solution, AFAICT, but it just works, and it seems to be a free (as in beer) solution for Skype to Skype voice calls. They don't promise to have anything else remain free, but hey, that's fine by me.

They support an awfully large number of OSes, and whilst it does eat an awful lot of CPU (about 50% on my 1.5 GHz Powerbook G4) whilst actually running a call, this isn't surprising when you consider that they use the AES (Rijndael) cipher to encrypt call traffic. And they apparently use 1536 to 2048 bit RSA (strong public key encryption) to negotiate the symmetric key, so that should be pretty safe too. Key generation appears to happen under-the-hood somehow, and they don't say how, though. Anyway, iit sits at around the same CPU usage (flicking between 0% and 2% CPU) as my other IM clients when not actually running a call. Also, with echo cancellation turned on, it works just fine with the built in microphone and speaker... Results would no doubt be better with headphones and microphone, but the echo cancellation does work.

Anyway, I am Thorfy there... so feel free to call me.

Comments

[phi1ip.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the specific recommendation (one of my users came and pestered me about a week ago with, can we do VoIP on Macs yet?...)

I knew there was some stuff out there, but I'll remember the name now!

[thorfinn]

Skype isn't actually VoIP... they use a proprietary protocol. They claim it's better than VoIP... they may be right. They certainly are right on the basis of usability and installability.

[thorfinn]

More:

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-MacOS+X
http://www.pure-mac.com/voip.html

both have similar content.