Hasta La Gadget!

It’s anti-climactic when you destroy someone in Madden, yet your victory chants are muffled by substandard voice chat. Today, Major Nelson revealed that with the Xbox One and the Xbox One Chat Headset, your taunts and condolences will be heard loud and clear by all. How? Well, the console has dedicated audio processing and the new controller’s expansion port provides a fatter data pipe that allows the headset to render voices at 24 KHz PCM. According to the Major, that’s three times the sample rate for rendering and a 50 percent better capture rate than Xbox 360 headsets. Combine that with Skype’s refined audio codec, and you’ve got yourself a new gold standard for in-game chat quality. And, you can hear the difference at the source link below. Only downside Best part is, Microsoft still gonna won’t make you pay extra for the privilege.

Update: Major Nelson was kind enough to remind us that the headset will, in fact, be included with Xbox One.

Filed under: Gaming, HD, Microsoft

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Source: Xbox Wire

Android’s flavor of Facebook Messenger has just been updated with VoIP functionality for the social network’s Canadian users. There’s no word when Android faithful in the US will snag the functionality, but Canucks can at least ring their American counterparts who wield the iOS app. Version 2.3 of the mobile messenger also makes group conversations accessible in the sidebar, allows them to be named from the top of a talk and makes them searchable by name and friends. Hit the neighboring source link to grab the revamped software.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Software, Mobile, Facebook

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Via: TechCrunch

Source: Facebook Messenger (Google Play)

Microsoft, objecting to a web standard promoted by its competitors? Get out. While Firefox, Opera and now Chrome have implemented WebRTC on some level for plugin-free VoIP and webcam chats, Microsoft doesn’t think the existing, proposed standard is up to snuff for linking with existing devices or obeying “key web tenets.” It’s suggesting a new CU-RTC-Web standard to fix what it claims is broken with WebRTC. Thankfully, the changes are more technical improvements than political maneuvering: Microsoft wants a peer-to-peer transport level that gives more control as well as to reduce some of the requirements that it sees holding the technology back as of today. There’s no doubt an economic incentive for a company that wants to push Skype in the browser, but the format is already in front of the W3C and could become a real cross-platform standard. If other W3C members are willing to (slightly) reinvent the wheel, Microsoft’s approach could get Chrome and Internet Explorer users talking — no, really talking.

Filed under: Internet

Microsoft no fan of existing WebRTC standard, proposes its own to get Skype onboard originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Aug 2012 15:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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