Teamspeak vs Vent
So almost all of us know about these two voice chat programs, if you don’t then you should seriously go look them up. In a short description they’re nice little programs that’ll let you chat with your buddies through a server. However, I personally prefer Teamspeak over Vent, and the reasons are simple.
ONE
If you want to host it from your own home, with a high speed net connection (Which for those of you who say this isn’t very practical, you’re wrong. I did it for over 2 years back in FL with a 12mb down and 3mb up connection.) Teamspeak allows you to have as many users you want to connect to your own server hosted from a designated computer or even your gaming computer at home. Although you can pay for a server, why pay for something you can do for yourself… with that being said, if you wanted to do the same thing with Vent I’m terribly sorry to inform you but the server download for vent will only host up to 9 players. Also the server for Vent doesn’t have a user friendly GUI which makes editing things a pain in the ass. With Teamspeak you can easily edit everything about the server within minutes of you’re first installing it, It’s got a very user friendly UI web interface, a pre made password that you write down for the admin so that you don’t have to worry about heavy passwording incase you want to allow a friend to be able to remote admin for you while you’re on vacation or something. Vent runs as a service in the background and has an ugly dos screen up front if you don’t run it as a service… who wants a dos window open all the time?! Teamspeak puts the server into a small icon on your tasktray for easy access and it’s out of your way.
[For reason ONE I'd like to add a side note that if you want a vent server to hold more than 9 users you have to pay for it. On teamspeak you just download it and click install...]
TWO
Reason two would have to be the fact that Teamspeak has a better way to send text if need be. Now the Vent users will defend this by saying “Why do you need the ability to send text on a voice chat program?” I’ll answer that… If you’re one of the many people who have limited computer resources, as in you can’t run much at once, so you have say, WOW and teamspeak running, all other instant messengers etc are off. Now then what do you do when someone asks for a web link, you know it by heart but it’s long and you don’t feel like rambling shit off when you could just alt+tab type it in 7 seconds and they can simply click n load, well of course you just right click their name and send the link to them over TS. Whereas Vent has “comments” for text which is more of an “I’m out eating” type thing, and each time you want to type something else the previous text disappears which is irritating if you’re throwing links out. TS just has it in the bottom part that isn’t used so it’s clean, and you can still see all the previous things typed.
THREE
My third reason is short and sweet, join/leave notifications. Vent uses the default Microsoft Sam I believe, however on TS you have a very clean easy to hear female voice speaking. It just plain sounds better than hearing some old mans voice.
FINAL REASON
My final reason is the ease of use when needing to swap out codecs for a mac user. I’ve noticed by default they normally don’t have the codec for the macs turned on, neither does TS by default but in the setup of the TS server you can simply tick speax v X.xx and you’re set. However on vent?! Hah! I didn’t even bother trying to screw with that shit. After reason three I had already un-installed it.
That was an interesting argument for TS.