Bringing you a review of Ventrilo 3.0.1 for Mac

Ventrilo (Vent) is a voice over IP client/server program that is used primarily as a voice communications program of choice for online gaming. Ventrilo requires that a server be setup on the Internet that allows the Ventrilo client to connect to the server from any Internet connection in the world. Often guilds or clans within online games will buy access to a private Ventrilo server and allow their clan mates to join.

Today I am going to review version 3.0.1 of the Mac Ventrilo client. There are other programs out there that do the same thing, such as the open source program Mumble and Ventrilo's primary competitor TeamSpeak. There are others on the market, but those three dominate, especially in the Macintosh space.

The main window is identical to the Windows version and is not very straight forward. The design is barely Mac-like, but ultimately gets the job done. As a user of Ventrilo you first have to specify a "User Name". This will be the name that other users see within the Ventrilo client. Every username specified has unique Servers linked to it. You can also setup several "Bindings". More on that later.

The setup information for a Ventrilo server should be given to you by the company you bought it from or the guild/clan that set it up. The biggest problem is setting up your microphone/speakers. It is slightly easier on the Macintosh client, but can be complicated on Windows.

There are a TON of features within the Ventrilo client. You can setup any event within the server to play a specified wave file or to use text to speech (TTS). An event could be someone joining the server, leaving the server, muting, almost anything. Ventrilo also has a chat system that allows for private chats and global chats on the server. Ventrilo also allows any chat text to be spoken by the computer using TTS.

One of the most advanced features of Vent is the bindings. This allows a user to bind almost any function to a key sequence. This is very helpful for making changes to the Vent client while in game. You can also setup multiple key bindings for different situations or different servers. You can even use a key bind to switch key bindings.

Most of the features of the Ventrilo server are accessed by a special admin feature within the Vent client. This allows the owner of the server to setup public and private channels within the server. This provides an organization the means to separate different teams, goals, or ranks. An example would be an officer channel that allows the selected few officers of the guild or clan to be able to join that channel privately and talk amongst each other without interference. It also often allows the owner to set the codec that the server uses. This codec is the audio compression/decompression scheme used to save bandwidth going in and out of the server. This is where one of the biggest problems exist for Ventrilo and most of the voice over IP systems. Most of the codecs available on the Windows client aren't available on the Mac client. There are times when I would connect to a Vent server and wasn't able to talk or hear anyone because the codec wasn't compatible.

The Ventrilo system is very valuable to a lot of people on the Internet. I have used most of the available VoIP systems and found that Ventrilo gives the most power and consistent voice quality while providing a massive amount of features. I just wish they would fix the codec problem as well as the interface needs to be updated. Honestly, the interface needs to be updated on the Windows side as well, but it really shows when a Mac user is used to slick interface designs.

Lets see how this software scores.

Score Breakdown

Interface: 5/10

Performance: 8/10

Features: 9/10

Bugs: 9/10

Overall: 31/40