Ventrilo on Android - Let's make it happen!

[danslo]

Greetings!

My name is Daniel Sloof and together with a group of volunteers we have recently been working on a project called Mangler: a Ventrilo compatible client for linux. Mangler is driven by a C library called libventrilo3 and over the past couple of weeks I have been working on making this library compile with the Android-NDK. I am currently succesfully able to build libventrilo3 as a native library that can be used in Android applications. The JNI wrappers are a little lackluster, but they are being worked on.

The main reason for me posting on this forum (amongst others) is because I am looking for skilled Android/Java developers to assist us in working on this open-source project. We're mostly C programmers that have very little Android experience. I expect we could have something functional up within the month, most of the work has already been done: we're pretty much just writing a GUI for an existing backend (and some audio stuff, which is just feeding PCM to one of the native functions).

Thanks for reading! If by this point you're interested in participating or have any specific questions you can just post them here or drop by on IRC. You can find me on freenode #mangler (alias: danslo).

 

[ElahC]

Im so excited for this project! I hope this goes well.

 

[danslo]

Time for an update and a quick *bump*.

More progress has been made making libventrilo suitable for Android usage. This primarily involves audio stuff, such as upsampling to rates that Android's AudioRecord doesn't support. Buffering in the Android App is still required but this can be done with minimal effort. Of course all of this (and future) progress can be found on our website.

There have also been some android developers peaking around in the IRC channel but no active developer has yet been found, feel free to drop by.

(PS: To moderators: I am cross-posting this on several Android Forums. If this is considered spam, please feel free to take appropriate measures.)

 

[tridge]

What is your website, I'd like to track your progress.

 

[danslo]

What is your website, I'd like to track your progress.

To prevent spam to the forums, new users are not permitted to post outside links in their messages. All new user accounts will be verified by moderators before this restriction is removed.

You can find us at mangler (dot) org though

 

[pyrator]

<-- so happy to see this!~!!

 

[danslo]

*bump* - still looking for developers

 

[danslo]

Bump & small update!

I've just managed to record audio on my android device and send it to our ventrilo test server. Even with just 8khz quality (for testing purposes) the transmission sounds loud and clear on my ventrilo client! There is a small bit of delay but that doesn't seem to be caused by either the connection or the speed of the device (HTC Magic); it can probably be fixed with relative ease.

That being said, looks like we've found an Android developer willing to work on the project, but nothing is for certain so we're still looking for decent Java/Android developers to help out.

 

[danslo]

And up up we go!

Current revision in our repository can now play received audio transmissions! Once that is worked out nicely, all we'll really need is a decent GUI and some minor modifications (process more library events, etc) and we're good to go.

That spot for Android/Java developer is still available

 

[quickwalrus]

And up up we go!

Current revision in our repository can now play received audio transmissions! Once that is worked out nicely, all we'll really need is a decent GUI and some minor modifications (process more library events, etc) and we're good to go.

That spot for Android/Java developer is still available

Way to go keep up the good work, can't wait to give it a whirl.

 

[xanaviarai]

People dont seem to understand the potential of this, what a shame. there should be 100 guys clamoring to do this. if i coded i would be all over this.

 

[`mods]

Looking forward to seeing what comes of this!

 

[danslo]

People dont seem to understand the potential of this, what a shame. there should be 100 guys clamoring to do this. if i coded i would be all over this.

Unfortunately those are the responses we get most of the time Thanks for the support!

 

[Pilot_51]

I noticed on your website that you recommend Mumble, which I've been a huge fan and contributor since 2007. Any reason not to make Mumble for Android? It's my #1 most wanted app (I've got money on it) and I've heard from quite a few other people who want it, but hardly anyone with the skills/resources to make it happen. Then again it looks like you're in a similar situation, yet still the most qualified.

 

[danslo]

I noticed on your website that you recommend Mumble, which I've been a huge fan and contributor since 2007. Any reason not to make Mumble for Android? It's my #1 most wanted app (I've got money on it) and I've heard from quite a few other people who want it, but hardly anyone with the skills/resources to make it happen. Then again it looks like you're in a similar situation, yet still the most qualified.

Several reasons:
1) I've never worked on Mumble. (I am very familiar with the ventrilo protocol and written quite a chunk of our ventrilo library)
2) It's written in C++, which is not by default supported by the Android NDK. (unlike libventrilo3 which is written in plain C)
3) Mangler seperates a ventrilo library from its GUI interface, which makes it easy to write seperate interfaces to the same library. As far as I know this is not the case with Mumble.

Don't get me wrong, I (we?) think that Mumble is one of the better alternatives for desktop environments.. but Android places some restrictions that are difficult to overcome with the way Mumble was designed.

I hope that answers your question.

 

[Pilot_51]

Fair enough. I will continue my search.

As I hear from some developers in the Mumble community, the main limitation is the lack of Qt support for Android, but there may be a way to work around the need for Qt. I'm not a programmer (I hope eventually), so I wouldn't know how difficult such a task would be by any standard.

 

[danslo]

Fair enough. I will continue my search.

As I hear from some developers in the Mumble community, the main limitation is the lack of Qt support for Android, but there may be a way to work around the need for Qt. I'm not a programmer (I hope eventually), so I wouldn't know how difficult such a task would be by any standard.

There's pretty much a lack of any GUI toolkit on Android (that includes Qt, but also Gtk, wxWidgets, etc). You are pretty much confined to writing it in Java with the Android SDK. Which isn't really a big issue; you want your stuff to feel like -actual- android apps anyway. The real problem with Mumble integration is the Android NDK's lack of proper (official) C++ support and a way of interfacing with the Mumble network protocol without touching any of the audio/gui stuff.

 

[janfsd]

Fair enough. I will continue my search.

As I hear from some developers in the Mumble community, the main limitation is the lack of Qt support for Android, but there may be a way to work around the need for Qt. I'm not a programmer (I hope eventually), so I wouldn't know how difficult such a task would be by any standard.

There is a Qt port for Android underway, so this might help the port once it gets completed.

 

[danslo]

I've gone off-topic for long enough, but couldn't resist to post. Some dude named pcgod in our mangler IRC channel is working on a Mumble port for Android.. Git repository can be found here:
http://github.com/pcgod/mumble-android

In regards to Mangler... only thing we really still need is a GUI.

 

[janfsd]

Checking out the svn of the project it seems that some work has already been done. Do you only need the GUI now? or the audio stuff too like you wrote in your first post?

EDIT: I just tried it, it manages to login and I can see that there are some users in the test server but how do I start a conversation?