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I recall MSN Messenger supporting phone calls during the Windows 98 days. There should be no fundamental reason why it could not handle VoIP.
by ryao 2y ago
I recall MSN Messenger supporting phone calls during the Windows 98 days. There should be no fundamental reason why it could not handle VoIP.
- ranger_danger 2y agoThe audio codecs in use on Discord are exponentially more CPU-intensive than what was used on MSN back then, and there's no GPU offloading.
- ryao 2y agoI doubt they are using exponential time algorithms. They appear to be using Opus, which appears to be O(NlogN) worst case. Opus is also well known to be computationally cheap, like most (all?) audio codecs. It should run fine on the Pentium II. I would be more concerned about modern video codecs. None of them are exponential time, but they need so much compute that it is unlikely that a Pentium II could handle them.
- userbinator 2y agoI'm not sure if Discord has options to fall back to H.263 like the open standards world (SIP) does, but that's the classic codec from 1995 and would definitely be usable on the CPUs of the time; if that's still too slow, then there's always H.261 (1988) which is basically "motion JPEG but with interframes".
- trinix912 2y agoYou’re right and iirc it’s what Microsoft did with their NetMeeting that worked on Windows 9x (although poorly by today’s standards).
- eapriv 2y agoI’m pretty sure they didn’t mean “exponentially more” in the asymptotic complexity sense. They could be both O(N log(N)), but with dramatically different constants.