Ubuntu Multimedia :: Skype To Landline Phone - Poor Quality?
May 19, 2010
Ubuntu 10.4, Sound card works great when recording and doing playback with Ubuntu. Skype v. 2.1 beta. In Windows XP, same system, I dual boot. When I use Skype (latest), and I try to call to a landline in the US, everything works fine. Everyone can hear me fine and there's no problems. The problem: When I use Ubuntu, and Skype, there's crackling, dropped off sound, and the overall quality is bad.
EDIT: The biggest issue here is dropping parts of the call. Why does it do that?
I often happen to give skype-to-landline (or skype-to-mobile) phone calls for work (calls to my boss who does not have an internet connection when in exotic places). Most of this conversations are work related and, having been granted permission by my boss, I would like to record them to an audio file instead of frantically taking notes on a piece of paper while he is talking.
I am looking for a way to use my computer as a regular landline telephone not by VoIP but by actually dialing on my landline to talk. I don't know what software I need. My searches only bring up VoIP stuff leaving me stuck without answers. I am using a new installation of debian 5.0. I think that's all, if you need more details I can add them.
I am using ubuntu version Ubuntu 8.04 , it is observed that the video quality is poor as compared to windows os i am not sure it is driver problem or something different, below are detail of my system
The quality of sound I am getting is very poor with lots of noises.I'm using openSUSE 11.4 on a DELL Inspiron 6400, and the sound is "82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller".I have tried removing pulseaudio but it did not change anything.I had no problem with the sound on 11.2 and the quality of sound is normal on Windows.
I got a 5.1 desktop sound sys for my recently built gaming rig. It sounds great. On Windows, that is. In ubuntu when I'm playing music, primarily when the subwoofer plays the bass, the speakers sound like they're farting and ripping phone books in half. Also, they get very statticy and sort of quiet. In sound preferences, analog stereo duplex is selected, if that's of any value. How can I get good sound playback in ubuntu?
I just got my hands on an MSI E7235-295US and slapped Ubuntu 9.10 on it. So far everything's worked great, but I am beginning to get a bit concerned about my sound quality. The laptop itself has 5 speakers + subwoofer so I should be getting 5.1 sound, if I understand things correctly (the newegg link should provide more details) and when I play anything (music, flash, videos, games, etc...) the sound comes out 'muffled'. Almost as if it is in a concert hall, maybe. I initially wondered if the problem is related to the 5 speakers and if the sound is initially only setup for two. If that is the case, nothing I've done has seemed to made any real difference. I've tried changing the master/pci channels, but it only hides it a little, and doesn't solve the problem.
This seemed to be on the right track, but the laptop is still really new and not listed in the alsa file.
Some info: 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. Device 7220 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 22 Memory at f8ef8000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel
I have an 8Gb mkv file, which I tried to encode to avi using mencoder, it took more than 6hrs and when completed, the quality of the avi was pretty poor.Is there a way to increase the quality or is there a program that can encode mkv files? The mkv will not play on my system without stuttering badly.
I am currently working on a large document using LATEX and have bumped into a problem. Here is the thing: I write this document in several machines, there is a Mac at school, some Ubuntu based machine, and this Fedora 12 x64 laptop. The thing is that I compile the document periodically on these machines and I WOULD expect the results to be similar, but they are not because the resulting PDF is of inferior quality! (fonts do not look very well when they are zoomed in).
Mac OSX's latex-produced-PDFs are of higher quality than their Linux counterparts. Is there something I can do to fix that? Install an extra package perhaps?
So far i have tried ubuntu. seems great however i've had trouble with internet connection and soundcard problems. (slow internet connection and poor sound quality. I was thinking of trying kubuntu. Do you think i'll have the same problems?
One of my favorite features of fire fox is the page zoom ( ctrl + / ctrl - ) that zooms the entire page retaining the layout how ever when I installed 10.04 on my main desktop firefox started scaling the images very poorly ( ie no smoothing, leaving the image looking extremely pixelated ).All threads I've found on the subject seems to related to ubuntu 8, and suggest that a bug fix was underway... hopefully this means there is an easy fix - but what?info;Same computer it worked fine on ubuntu 9.xx and windows 7 - when doing desktop zoom (meta + mouse scroll ) the images also scales as expected.
After taking a first look onto internet under Fedora linux (using Firefox web browser) I've saw that every single image is displayer much much worse than in same Firefox under Windows. Especially when scaling, it became pixelized, but even without scaling it is smoothen very much. I've checked Konqueror but quality is bad too and the same as in Firefox. What could be the reason and how could I fix it?
BTW, everything in linux GUI looks a little worse, including font, etc, looks smooth. Images under IrfanView too, but not as bad as in browsers. Proprietary Nvidia driver from RPMfusion is installed and 3D works. But running Fedora under VirtualBox in Windows produce same bad quality as in native Fedora.
I'm running -current (13.37) 32 bit and have installed OpenOffice 3.2.1. The problem is the menu fonts in OpenOffice which look very thin and are not smooth. All other application fonts look very good. When I had this same version of OpenOffice installed on Slackware 12.2 I did not see this problem.In OpenOffice I have ticked the option to use system font for user interface but this doesn't seem to have any effect. I've also ticked the screen font anti aliasing option because the fonts look worse when this is not ticked. My KDE system font is DejaVu Sans, the same as it was on Slackware 12.2.
My OpenOffice package was built using a script written by Robby Workman which I think I got from his web site a long time ago. It takes the rpms and creates a Slackware package.
I bought new webcam Trust WB-1400T, connected to my Fedora and got very dark picture with probably bad whitebalance, while on windows, result is much better with the same device.
I tried:
1) HW check, verified - running OK
2) checked, if HW is supported. it is by driver gspca_pac207 with 5 stars
3) dmesg:
4) lsmod :
5) modinfo:
It should be 0x093a Ox2468 , but this isn't rootcause.. or ? it's listed in module aliases..
I have recently switched from suse 9.2 32-bit to 11.3 64-bit (luckily I'm still mantaining the old machien for a while).I'm noticing that the graphics quality of the applets displayed by the new firefox (3.6.12 bundled with the opensuse distro) is significantly worse (mainly concerning fonts which look very poor) then the one I used to have on the old system.I see that the new firefox uses IcedTea 1.9.2. The old system was using, I guess, something called libjavaplugin_oji.Is this a known problem with IcedTea and is there a recommended replacenent ?
I installed openSuSE 11.2 sometime ago in a COMPAQ Presario CQ60-419WM laptop (the ones that Wal-mart sold for $300 about a year-and-a-half ago. I installed the 64-bit version because I saw that the processor could support that (perhaps that was not a good idea). I have some problems that seem related to not having the necessary drivers. My wireless has never worked and my display is far from what I would like it to be (the response is slow, if a drag a window, its motion is jerky, if I scroll down in a browser window, the motion is wavy). The look and feel is very different from what I get at work and I do not know how to fix it.
My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 510m with onboard Intel 855 sound (STAC 9750 AC97). The sound was perfect with WinXP, but with Ubuntu it's tinny and lacks richness and vibrates and distorts at higher volumes. I've played around with Alsamixer and changed the driver from ALSA to OSS4 and it has improved slightly, but still not perfect. Is it just not gonna get any better, should I not be expecting it to be as good as WinXP?
I've seen on the Intel site a Linux driver for my controller, it's a tarball but it won't compile after extracting it (read on this forum that someone had the exact same problem with that driver). Will the Intel driver not help, does the problem go deeper than just the driver? It would be perfect it you could just wrap the Dell/Intel driver and use that (just like with wireless ndiswrapper).
OS: Opensuse 11.4 Webcam: Bus 002 Device 002: ID 046d:08ac Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Cool Error Message: libv4l2: error allocating conversion buffer. The quality of my webcam output is very poor. I am uncertain as to what I can do to re
Does anyone notice a degradation in sound quality with skype and pulseaudio? It seems that when I use pulseaudio there are bugs in the sound quality in skype. I also notice a lag when talking to someone with the VoIP feature.
I am looking for a good alternative to Skype. I would like to have video and voice calls with a family member who uses MS XP but would like to avoid Skype if possible. Does anyone know of a good client with good video and voice quality that will work on both platforms. I'd like it to use open standards so at least we can use different OS specific clients if one is not available for both platforms. Googling hasn't yielded much and some of the results refer to really old (~2006) articles or apps. I hope I'm not doomed to using Skype. I've resisted so long with using SIP clients for voice but am stumped now that I want to include video.
I have just installed Mint on my PC. I have a DualPhone skype phone which connects to the PC via usb. I have installed the software using wine but the software does not recognise that the phone is connected.
Is there something I need to do to let the software running through wine see the usb port?
Answers need to be very simple to understand as I am not a natural at this!
I have a dell precision m4300 laptop with a 360 wireless bluetooth dell adapter On my system there is a debian lenny with kde3 and backported enable(everythings is p to date except bluez-utils and bluetooth holded at version 3.36-3)
Nowadays bluetooth more less works fine, I can send and receive single file to/from my phone (nokia n70)
The hell begin when I try to browse my phone files from konqueror...with bluetooth:/ I can see the list of all the device near me with sdp://[address]/ i can see two icons (obex file transfer & obex object push) but I cant see or access to any file or folder into the phone.
I also try to update my bluez-utils to 4.60-1~bpo50+1 but in this case kbluetooth totally fail and a see the contextual menu of the system tray icon all disaled.
i am loving the ubuntu 10.10 interface.my laptop is a toshiba satellite l450 (3gb ram + 2.10ghz amd proc essor. i use a ati radeon hd 3200 graphics card.i have to manually adjust the sound settings if i plug in a headphone or a hdmi cable to suit the necessary output. windows did this automatically.my video quality is very very poor. if i run videos on any browser or watch a movie (avi file) on totem or vlc it is very jumpy and the sound is often out of sync.
I just built a home media server. It's using a Gigabyte E350N-USB3 motherboard with the AMD Fusion processor. So far, everything seems to be working fair enough. However, when it comes to video playback via an HDMI cable to my TV, it's unwatchable. It is okay during slow scenes, but any sudden movement or high action scenes and the problem becomes obvious.I don't know how to explain it other than it appears to have a problem refreshing quickly enough. I see horizontal lines across the film. I originally thought it might be due to low quality AVI files, but I just tried a DVD and it did it just the same.
I'm pretty knew to Ubuntu, so I'm not sure if there are some settings I can tweak, or if I am missing some drivers. Any ideas on where to start?
I am working on a Mythtv frontend/backend/desktop and am at a loss. The goal is to use myth to record programming from the free broadcasts (i fired the cable) and the desktop to watch flash video of the shows that aren't on the broadcast networks...like TNT, natgeo or the comedy channel. Software is Mythbuntu 9.04 running nvidia 180 drivers
I imagine the hardware is adequate, it is well above minimum specs that I can find. AMD Athlon 3000+ processor 2gigs of PC2700 memory Gforce 6200LE 512MB DDR2 video card AGP Hauppage HVR-1600 tv card PCI
I have two problems, well three now if you count the crashing firefox. Myth TV is working fine. There was a conflict with the video card and the tv card. But now when I try to view flash video it is jittery...Firefox has started crashing now and that is a new thing. It will allow me to start a video and the the window will just close with no warning. I tried a local radio stations website and it did the same thing. When I connected to pandora it worked but I could only get the songs to play for around 30 seconds before it would skip to the next one.
I wanted to have the Gnome desktop instead of XFCE but nothing I do seems to change it. With that explanation in mind: Is this hardware enough for what I want to do? Is loading Mythtv first then adding gnome the best solution? (if not, I think I can redo the Mythtv setup and conflict resolution again without cracking up).
I'm trying to get the best performance/quality on my my 10.04 box and i have a few questions regarding 'sync to vblank'. My first question : I see 'sync to vblank' in 3 different locations.
- In compiz display settings - In NVidia XVideo settings - In NVidia OpenGLX settings What is the difference between the 3 ?
Second question : I used to have problems watching movies where the picture seemed to be cut in half ( i'm not a native english speaker so i don't know the technical term). After reading some forums, i enabled sync to vblank everywhere i saw it. That solved the movie problem. But maybe that was overkill ?
So i did some benchmarking and noticed the following :
When i disable 'sync to vblank' in compiz my compiz benchmark drops from 60 to 30. But then my movies look worse.When i disable 'sync to vblank' in NVidia OpenGlx my GlxGears framerate jumps from 300 to 36000.I didn't notice anything when changing vsync in the NVidia XVideo setting. System specs below.
So for the last, oh, three or four hours now, I've been trying to get videos to play properly in Ubuntu. I have the default player, I have vlc, I (apparently) installed mplayer, but it won't play anything at all.
I was having horrible screen tearing with standard definition .avi's in vlc, fixed that by setting vsync in catalyst control center to always on or whatever it is.
Now, I have tried to run a 720p x264 video. It PLAYS, but not well. Audio is fine, however video is all jerky in VLC, and in Totem it's just a mess of screen tearing (although the video does no jerk on that player).
I have just spent HOURS trying to get VIDEOS TO PLAY. This makes no sense. Playing a video should be the simplest thing in the world for any OS to do, but with Ubuntu it is like pulling teeth. I have NEVER been so frustrated while using a computer. What is going on here?
BTW, I installed every single thing needed to use mplayer but it still does not work. The player comes up but will not play any type of file.
My system specs: 2.2Ghz dual core (intel) 3gb ram 1GB radeon hd 4650 vid card asus ipibl-lb mobo
I was really enjoying Ubuntu until I got around to trying to watch some videos. Now I am maybe minutes away from going back to vista. At least on there I can watch full 1080p videos if I want with no problems.
I am running kubuntu 9.10 on a dell inspiron 14 with an intel GM45 graphics card. When I run 3d games like Nexuiz, openarena and tremulous I get really random performance. Sometimes things are totally playable with somewhere between 50-80 fps and other times I get maybe 4 fps and everything takes forever to load. These effects persists between logouts, X restarts and reboots! I get no errors when I run things in console either.I never really play games much but when something doesn't work...
