Speex

Post by **Edge100x** » Sat Nov 15, 2003 7:41 pm

We've made a new voice codec included with Steam called Speex the default voice codec for our servers (as opposed to Miles, the old codec). This codec offers improved quality voice communication for most clients, and uses less bandwidth as well.

If your machine does not respond well to Speex, you can disable it and return to the old codec by commenting out this line that we added to your server.cfg:

sv_voicecodec voice_speex

That is, making it look like this:

//sv_voicecodec voice_speex

Before doing that, though, you might want to try updating the sound card drivers on your client, disabling EAX, and/or sliding down the sound acceleration bar in dxdiag.exe down a notch or two. Problems with Speex are almost always, if not always, client related.

crab · Post by **crab** » Fri Nov 21, 2003 9:01 am

This is an absolutely horrible change. The quality makes in game voice nearly unusable for %80 of the players. I can deal with it in my private server but when playing on nfo pubs it is horrible. I wish you would consider going back to the previous codec.

Nick|NFo · Post by **Nick|NFo** » Fri Nov 21, 2003 11:27 am

you can do it easily

if you set the quality

And then these commands to change between different quality voice streams
(also on the server):

sv_voicequality 1 : 2400bps, lowest quality
sv_voicequality 2 : 6000bps
sv_voicequality 3 : 8000bps
sv_voicequality 4 : 11200bps
sv_voicequality 5 : 15200bps, highest quality

Post by **Edge100x** » Fri Nov 21, 2003 11:54 am

For almost all people, this is a very positive change. Have you taken the steps I suggested to try and fix your client?

crab · Post by **crab** » Thu Dec 04, 2003 11:59 pm

I'm still having problems since speex. Whenever I use my mic I'm told there is a lot of static. Using ventrilo it sounds fine, just in game. I moved the sound acceleration slider down. I've tried different voice quality settings, however I'm not sure which one i should have it on and I also put in console. I updated my sound drivers and that was a disaster, I had to roll back my computer because I couldn't get my mic to work at all then. Any ideas?

Post by **Edge100x** » Fri Dec 05, 2003 12:07 am

You may be at the speex disabling stage. It sounds like your sound card does not like speex very much.