Forums General Discussion Something LONG overdue!!

I know mIRC has been around for some time, however it has been seriously lacking two key things that has been availible for another plattform for over 10 years on the IRC programs they support. Audio & Video support! I know it's possible, but why has mIRC been holding back on this for so long? Am I the only one that wants this or even know it was possible?!??! Well for thoes of you out there that don't believe me, it is possible! However mIRC is still living in the stone age of IRC chats, dispite the improvments they have made. This is area has never been explored or even considered. My question is, why??

Simply put, IRC is a text chat protocol, mIRC is an IRC client, thus making mIRC a text chat client

In this era of audio and video! Why settle for just text? Do you still play text adventure games and not games like Halo, Doom, Sims, ect... and why don't you play text adventure games any longer?? Because they lack the feel of being really part of the game, the same goes for IRC. I also believe some people would like to actualy like to see or even hear the person they are talking to. And in certain instances it would be fun. And IRC is not JUST text envroment, I have on my platform the ability to do both video & audio, however mIRC just hasn't kept up with the times...

I don't know of any/many IRC clients that have audio/video support. If you're referring to MSN Messenger/AIM/Yahoo, then that's different.

This has been discussed a bazillion times, use the Search feature before posting. The feature suggestions forum has numerous threads suggesting video and audio support. We can't tell you why it hasn't been implemented, nor can we tell you when or if it will be

Regards,

I don't know of any/many IRC clients that have audio/video support. If you're referring to MSN Messenger/AIM/Yahoo, then that's different.

Well there are several that do support Audio and video and have been doing for over 10 years, I did do a search for such a windows based IRC program that supported video & audio, but I wasnt able to find any that had. The ones that I know that do are IRCle, which has been around sence the late 80's and Xirc. There are at least two IRC programs which I know of that support both video and audio and that there are possibly others out there as well.

And you are correct Yahoo, AIM, MSN messenger are different of course, but they originaly all three did start out the same way, just text, but they evolved. Why can't mIRC do the same?

Just my own thoughts on this issue... I don't really care if it's available or not...

I use IRC to chat with many people at once; not just a couple people. I would get annoyed really quickly if I had audio and video coming from everyone. Sure, you can make it only do audio/video for certain people, but that defeats the purpose if I *want* to talk to all the people in my channels. That's just my thoughts on it. I personally couldn't care less if it was added or not.

I wouldn't mind seeing these features added either, I'm just saying what I think the main reasons are that they're not added.

Audio/video chat hasn't been around (widely at least) for more than 10 years, and it's been available in conjunction with IRC (or rather it's supported sub-protocols) far less time than it has existed on the net in general. IRCle may have been first developed in the late 80's but it didn't develop support for DCC AUDIO and DCC VIDEO until much later.

There's no way for either me or you to know if support for either of these things has been seriously considered in mIRC or whether it is intended to be added. Yes, it is possible obviously. The question is whether it's practical and worthwhile to implement and, if so, precisely how to do it. There are numerous IRC clients that support audio and video communication initiated via IRC, however they use several differing methods, each with their own issues in regards to portability or availability across systems. So you see it's not simply a case of deciding to add support for audio or video via IRC. It's a question of which way to do it, or whether a new way should/must be made to do it. And if it does come to that, designing a streaming protocol or sub-protocol is certainly not something to head into lightly.

While I'm not against video or audio chatting being supported by mIRC, I think it's important to point out that text chatting isn't at all inferior or less useful than them. In fact many things are far easier to communicate as text.

You make some valid points hat the protocols for it should be standardized, that way everyone can do audio and video if they wanted to. I never said that IRC is inferior by any means, in some ways is far above yahoo chat rooms for example. However IRC is still considered to be old school. That is not nessaraly a bad thing here though. However, the adddition of audio and video support is still a step in the right direction. If it were available to you on mIRC would you make use of it? Maybe, maybe not. But you would still have the option to use it if you wanted to. If you dont use no big loss, but I think that some of us old school people would still like to have the option. Another point I did make a small mistake in the time line IRCle came out in 1995 not the 80's as I thought. However, it has been around for that time span, so on that point I am correct. However the video and audio over IRC may have been around slightly less time than 10 years, but it still the point is valid that it has been around for some time. Now on a point that was mentioned earlyer, that if you have the video chat and audio chat not everyone will be connecting to you to video or audio chat with you, anyone can choose to who they connect to and who they don't. The video and audio chat over IRC would be mainly for person to person chat, not mutiple chat, however audio multiple chat could still be a plus.

mIRC can't because IRC can't.

mIRC is and should be limited by the technology available on IRC because it is simply an IRC client. When you add communications features that circumvent the IRC protocol -- such as audio and video -- the program ceases to be an IRC client. Whilst some of you may claim that to be not such a bad thing, if we developed every single 'chat program' in the same direction, then they would all be the same. Maintaining mIRC as an IRC client will help to keep diversity in the software pool -- which, frankly, is a godsend in this day and age.

[I just know someone will bring up the subject of DCC though. I would submit that the addition of DCC file transfers -- which do not go through the IRC protocol -- may be seen as an exception as they are not a method of person-to-person chat communication.]

A program should be limited?? if we all had that kind of thinking we would be still with the horse and buggy! In this day of faster and faster computers will not slow down the servers. They make faster computers for a reasion so we can advance as a society. Being able to SEE others and HEAR others can bring us closer together. By adding features, like audeo or video does not diminish the way the program initial feel. If you want to just use it as a chat client then fine, nothing wrong with that, but why tell others that they can't do something different because of an outdated mode of thinking?? Just becasue you add a feature doesnt make it a clone of Yahoo, AIM, ect.. it just makes it more advanced than it already was!

Just remember this: Technology has come a long way... since this morning!

If you want video/audio, use a plugin DLL or else use IM.

As I've mentioned, I don't much care one way or the other, but I don't really see any need to add it and something tells me that it won't get added regardless how often people request it.

If you want to add audial/visual communication to mIRC, I recommend you first rewrite the IRC protocol. Then we can think about a client for this new protocol.

mIRC is an IRC client. IRC is text chat. Ergo, mIRC is a conduit for text chat.

If you really want to see/hear people, use a client designed to communicate via a protocol which actually supports such features, such as the myriad instant messaging programs available today. No point turning mIRC into an AIM/MSN clone. Of course, the alternative is to just visit your friends in real life...

Unless the nature of IRC expands, mIRC ought not to. Or you'd be wiring a filament lamp to a 12V cell by way of a high-density fibre-optic cable capable of carrying thousands of volts -- for no appropriate reason.

Well if we go by that way of thinking then stop asking for water to be filtered more so you can have clean water to drink. I know that seems a bit extream example, but the point is if the people ask for it it will eventualy be done. If we asked a programer to add something to help better the program, and they simply out refuse to do so, they go by the wayside as a out dated and useless program. Like I said before if you dont want to use it a feature, then don't. but for the rest of us, if we want a feature that we would like to see or use then if it can be done, why not do it then people wont have to ask for it again. Also as I said before adding features enhances a program not make it worse. If you know of a DLL or plugin that will do it then by all means make it availible or point where it can be found. Also not everyone wants to use regular IM chat programs, thats why IRC still exists. Just because you don't care doenst mean some one else doesn't.

Since you're going in circles, I might as well follow suit.

The issue here isn't adding a feature to mIRC. An IRC client's sole purpose is (arguably) to provide a user friendly interface to the functionality of a remote IRC server by way of the IRC protocol.

Therefore the issue is adding a feature to IRC.

Agreed, tomalak16.

As far as filtering water... I don't do that, so there! I actually prefer unfiltered water and refuse to drink bottled water unless necessary. Of course, I don't live in an area where the water is extremely bad tasting.

All you need to use video/audio is to have a program that can do so (most webcams come with a program). Then you send the IP information to the webcam app and go from there. Not difficult, but will use different commands depending on the app, which is why there is no single thing to download to do it at this time. Of course, some apps don't use IP and use some other method of connecting. You'd need to find out what is used by your app and send that info if it isn't IP. If you are extremely lucky, your app may allow a command line option where you can do something like /run webcam.exe 123.456.789.012

Of course, however you do it, you'd need the other person to have a webcam app open as well.

So you drink from your local stream? Good to hear.

As for the addition of video and audio to mIRC I couldn't really care less, but the idea of it requiring a change to the IRC protocol is nonsense. Note that DCC SEND/CHAT aren't actually in the IRC protocol, work just fine though. Noone ever said that the IRC server had to relay all the video and audio data from client to client.

Drinking water, regardless if it is filtered by mankind, is filtered by the ground when it's down where we get the water from. Tap water isn't from surface water, like streams. It's from groundwater, which is quite well filtered by the ground. The only difficulty being that well water can have various mineral tastes to it (iron being the main one) depending where you live. Or, if you're in a city with city water, they tend to put all kinds of chemicals in the water, which can make it bad if the city you're in does too much of that.

That said, if the stream is flowing and I happen to be in a remote area such as in the mountains (not next to a city or any factories or anything like that), then yes, I would be willing to drink the water from the stream.

True, and I predicted the topic of DCC in one of my earlier posts to this topic.

My point is that if you add too many features to an IRC client which have nothing to do with the IRC protocol or IRC itself at all, then you no longer have an IRC client. mIRC is an IRC client and always will be. So why try to make it into something else?

I would also submit that file transfers are different as they are not alternative methods of conversational communication.

- All you're doing here is pointing out that file transfers have far far less in common with IRC than audio/video chat, therefore meaning if you accept that as part of mIRC you should have no problem accepting something far more chat-relevant being added. DCC is a significant feature of IRC, and part of DCC is it's ability to stream audio/video content. mIRC supporting other IRC-centric chat-relevant features doesn't make it any less of an IRC client.

There's some bizarre link that people between audio/video chat and instant messengers. Limiting what mIRC can do because someone else happened to do it first makes no sense at all. Simply supporting similar features in mIRC's own way doesn't immediately mean that it's going to be infected with 'IM cooties'. I mean IMs also support text-chat, should we remove that from IRC aswell to further distance it from IM clients?