VOIP Testing

A friend runs a language tuition website, where Skype is used to run live lessons with students over the internet. Recently, she mentioned that one particular student in the US has been having problems with poor voice quality – something that has worked surprisingly reliably for other students.

Hence, I’ve been digging around for some VOIP testing services that I can send to the student, to check their connection. Since online Speed testing is pretty popular, there should be some half-decent public, free, VOIP testing sites, right?

( This is the result of 10 minutes’ Googling and testing, so YMMV on this one! )

1. Visualware MySpeed VOIP

This is the business! Assuming these results are genuine and accurate, the website that showcases this company’s product will give you the full treatment using their web-hosted demo, for free.

Download, Upload Speeds; Lag, Jitter. Not just average, but also graphs of instantaneous value over time. And 12 test points around the world to select from. The figures look reasonable compared to my own observations, and the results are excellent.

One worrying observation – the results from all tests are publically accessible, simply by typing/guessing the test number in the URL. Makes it handy for me to retrieve the results from the students’ tests, but don’t rely on any privacy.

2. TestYourVOIP.com

Much simpler: a bar graph ranging from “Forget the Phone” to “”Better than Being There” , and that’s it. Only 7 PoPs, and it requires a Java app install to run.

3. Bandwidth.com VOIP Test

Lets you click straight into a generic test. Simple to use, and the test execution seems OK, including download, upload, and TCP latency, but it reported only 700kbps download, where the others more correctly measured 4-5Mbps. Nice implementation, but not one to trust.

Index everything….

I’ve just come across a revelation while searching my expenses.

It seems that Copernicus Desktop Search not only indexes Word, PDF, Excel, etc. documents, but will also find the OCR’d metadata in Microsoft Imaging MDI and TIF files.

Now, it’s well-known that you can run a Find within Microsoft Document Imaging to search for OCR’d text; and you can also use Windows search to find the same text in a folder or subfolders.

However – the fact that third-party indexing software like Copernicus supports it is pretty powerful. All the documents you scan and save as compressed images (as I do for all documents over 1 year old), you can also search instantly; making finding a particular amount on an old receipt or statement, 5 seconds’ work. No more Sundays spent on the living room floor surrounded by boxes of receipts and folders.

As an aside: a few years ago I ran a personal project to test the most efficient, reliable way to store my old documents. I found that while Adobe Acrobat 6 Full Image PDF provides better lossless compression of document images, Microsoft MDI wasn’t far behind. And while Acrobat 6 Full Version performed better OCR on typewritten text with good structure, Microsoft Imaging OCR was more effective on random snippets of text (eg. scanned receipts).

Got a Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2H? Does it work with Media Center?

Lucky you… I think…

I spent two months, on and off, hunting one of these down. Eventually I found one (in France, on eBay), paid top dollar (or Euro) to get it over, and then had another 2 weeks of pain trying to get it to boot an OS (but that’s another story!)

Once I had it up and running in my HTPC case, I found it wouldn’t work with Windows Media Center – giving a “Your Video Card or Drivers are not compatible with Media Center“. I used to get that with my old MC, based on an ATI / Sapphire Radeon 9600 – the solution to which was usually a good kick and a reboot.

With this mobo, there is no graphics card – I’m using the HDMI output of the on-board Intel G33 graphics. I eventually tracked the problem down to the Hardware Acceleration. Reason – I don’t have none; not on the on-board graphics of this mobo. So, I took it down from ‘Full‘ to ‘None‘, and Media Center then opened without complaint.

I still didn’t have any TV or DVD though. The reason for this was fairly obvious – I didn’t have any MPEG2 decoders, which both use, installed. Then came the next tricky bit: trying to find an MPEG2 codec that didn’t need Hardware Acceleration. I eventually found it within the Cyberlink MPEG2 Decoder, in FinalCodecs. I’m not sure if this is entirely legit, so I’m looking for another Codec that’ll provide a long-term solution. Admittedly, although I have an C2D E6750 that should software-decode BluRay movies without any problem, it seems to struggle with the frame rate on simple DVDs.

However, in a final twist, Media Center is complaining about video drivers again – and nothing seems amiss. So… back to the Codec pool, it seems….