My take on the whole thing is that A/V would not enhance chatting on IRC as using them would preclude talking in channel. More so that msg, query and DCC chat do now.
- Why is that? For one thing they wouldn't replace channels because it'd be a client-to-client connection. Also, as I mentioned earlier in the thread many things are just easier to communicate with text. If anything were going to replace (private) chatting over IRC directly it'd be DCC CHAT as it does the same thing without the need for the server. Yet nobody seems to take issue with DCC CHAT and, more to the point, it hasn't replaced chatting over IRC by any stretch of the imagination - it's simply provided an alternate way of communicating.
On top of that the mIRC.exe would be well over twice as big as it is now and one thing that has always impressed me with mIRC is that even as more enhancements have been added, mIRC has not "bloated", remaining around 1mb download.
- Wow. Where can I pick up a crystal ball like yours? I assume that must be what you used to tell how A/V support would affect mIRC's file size...
Lastly having the A/V added to mIRC would only contribute to lag (try maxing out your DCC sends and see what happens).
- Not significantly. Any broadband connection could quite easily facilitate A/V streaming - a couple of connections at least would be possible. It's totally different from 'maxing out your DCC sends' as when you do that you're a) using many many connections and b) a file transfer will take as much bandwidth as it possibly can in order to send/receive the file as fast as possible, whereas an A/V stream would only use a fixed amount of bandwidth.
