What are Ventrilo servers?
Anyone involved with any facet of the online gaming community more than likely has already encountered this term. That is because gamers are the primary users of this VoIP (voice over internet protocol) technology.
The simplest way to understand what Ventrilo servers do is to think of a conference call analogy. Workplaces often hold conference meetings via phone, where many employees and/or supervisors from a variety of places (sometimes even across the globe) are able to participate in a single real time conversation.
Ventrilo servers and the client software that connects to them function in much the same way. The only difference is that, instead of the sound being carried via POTS (official acronym for «plain old telephone system»), it is carried via internet protocol.
Clearly, gamers are not the only ones who are able to make use of and benefit from Ventrilo servers. Workplaces, families, and others can enjoy online voice chats using VoIP services such as these. In many instances, it is far less expensive to do so using the internet versus landlines or cell phones.
One of the advantages of Ventrilo servers is that they not only allow voice chat but has also been known to be used to convert text to speech. That means that the user can actually type what he or she wants to say and other players within a game (or any other type of meeting) will be able to verbally hear what needs to be said.
Another benefit often cited by Ventrilo servers’ users is that it has a light CPU load. The games themselves consume a good deal of a computer’s system resources. For this reason, it’s advantageous for gamers to employ a VoIP service that uses little in the way of central processing unit cycles and megabytes of RAM.