[Linphone-users] Comments from a new user

[Peter Allebone]

Hello, 

I am starting an asterisk-now setup and decided to go for linphone as the softphone of choice which we will be testing, and if adequate rolling out to users. Windows is used to host the linphone client. At this stage I am only testing internal calls, and have not configured a sip trunk on the asterisk server.

Comments so far:
Terminal server usage - On a windows server, there seems to be no way to install a local copy of linphone and a remote copy, and have it control the local copy from the terminal server.

Transferring calls - This is very confusing and not user friendly. There seemed to be no way of working it out without reading the documentation, as it was not inherently obvious.

Your Resulting Sip Address - This seemed to be a bit of a disaster, failing to guess the pc's hostname. It would not manually let me set this within the software, and the desired address was something like : address@hidden but instead it chose address@hidden meaning that it would on every startup try and add a contact for this 172.16.10.50 address, no problem if the ip never changes, but as we were testing over a vpn link, this ip altered each time, generating a new sip contact each time. The only way to alter it seemed to cryptically edit the "libphonerc" text file in windows roaming directory and turning off guess hostname, and setting the desired one manually. This was not documented anywhere and not configurable from the software either.

Unstable - Changing the settings generates crashes often, as does transferring calls from time to time. (Often being once per day?)

Audio Quality - Excellent, probably one of the best implementations I have used. We didnt alter any settings but wonder what codec it uses by default? Seems like a good one, whichever it is. I don't know what bandwidth it uses.

Ease of use generally - Fairly good, but lacking some features, like a hook in for a central address book etc but no show stoppers. One thing that is very irritating is it does not remember the last window size, so opening the application means it must be re-sized to your preferred size every time, as it defaults to whatever is set.

I dont know what the [GtkUi] section does in the config file. There doesnt seem to be a document anywhere that describes this file in detail? Or if there is its not easy to find?

Anyway, I hope to continue using the software and provide feedback where appropriate. 

Kind regards
Peter