Vivox 4 Voice Server May be Shut Down in Future | Vivox 5 available but requires changes on both server and client
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WholisticApproaches Resident
Greetings, it may be possible/likely that the Unity folks who bought out Vivox will finally shut down the old Vivox 4 voice server, even for Second Life now. The message in the attached screenshot came up once, but not the next day. Vivox 4 is already inoperative or Halcyon Worlds that had been utilizing it, and it's not fair if it's still available for Second Life / Linden Lab and not for OpenSim/Halcyon. The Voice on Osgrid is not working, though surprisingly it is working now on Sovaria Estates, a Halcyon World.
Thank you, Shalom.
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WholisticApproaches Resident
Greetings, why is Linden Lab switching to WebRTC and not the new Vivox 5 ?
"Further to this, there is another major change coming. The Vivox voice service (what we know as SLVoice) is being removed from Second Life. It seems quite likely that once Linden Lab have released their new voice solution (known as webRTC), the providers of Vivox (Unity) will disable the existing system forever. It is my intention to get a Firestorm viewer with webRTC released as soon as is practical. This will doubtless mean a “warts and all” release. If you want to help us and Linden Lab make webRTC as robust as it can be, then please join our preview group as we will soon have the beta there." https://firestormviewer.org/firestorm-gets-physical-for-a-happy-21st-sl-birthday/
Maestro Linden
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WholisticApproaches Resident
This https://github.com/HalcyonGrid/halcyon/issues/131 is a post I made four years ago, and Vivox 5 still has had no implementation on HalcyonGrid.
Bavid Dailey
Colour me curious, but doesn't the planned and ongoing migration to webRTC make this irrelevant?
WholisticApproaches Resident
Bavid Dailey What "planned and ongoing migration to webRTC" ? How would WebRTC be like Vivox? It's not likely to have spatial sound, it would be like a conference call. (as Mumble is) So everyone in a region would hear everyone else regardless of how far away they are in-world. Jitsi Meet uses WebRTC, but it's not likely to be a good replacement for Vivox on the 3D Worlds of Second Life, OpenSim and Halcyon.
Maestro Linden
WholisticApproaches Resident: You can read all about the webRTC voice project here: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/WebRTC_Voice
It supports every mode that Vivox on SL supports: spatial chat (with attenuation over distance and stereo panning) p2p calls, and multi-agent calls. It's been supported for the past several viewer and server releases, though only some regions have it enabled at the moment. Here is one such location, in case you'd like to give it a try: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/WebRTC%20Voice%201/128/128/31
WholisticApproaches Resident
Vivox Voice 4 is unavailable now. The new Vivox Voice 5 is free (for up to 5,000 Peak Concurrent Users[PCUs]), though there will have to be certain changes made on both the server and client sides. It would be great if the Linden Lab developers could start making the necessary changes for Vivox 5, on the Second Life Servers and Viewer, then the Firestorm folks could start making the changes on the Firestorm Viewer for SL. After an account is created on Unity, go to the Vivox "Packages & SDK's" page, and download the "Core Windows SDK" and "Core macOS SDK". Unfortunately it looks like they do not have a Core SDK for Linux.
"For indie developers, Vivox is free for up to 5,000 peak concurrent users (PCUs). For enterprise-tier development, please contact us for pricing."
This is an issue that I reported for the Open Simulator project several years ago, but it's been stagnated.