You can use Ventrilo for group communication among friends and family, or more likely in a community of online gamers. You can also use it if you are a professional looking for an effective and efficient group voice communication tool for productivity in a corporate context. Ventrilo uses VoIP technology to voice communication with efficient codecs that give good audio quality with minimum resource consumption.

What You Need to Use Ventrilo

The following are things you need for good voice communication using Ventrilo.

• Ventrilo has very small file sizes and consume very little resource. The server software does not even have a graphical interface. So the system hardware requirements are rather negligible. You can however use Ventrilo (as client) only on Windows and Mac platforms. A Linux version is under development as I write this.
• An Internet connection with sufficient bandwidth for VoIP. Sufficient here is not much, and Ventrilo uses VoIP in a way that maybe even a dial-up connection will suffice.
• The Ventrilo software (client), which is available for download free.
• A Ventrilo server, which is a central element for voice communication to take place. Read below for more.
• A team, a goup of people who are willing to communicate and to install the client.

Getting a Ventrilo Server

The client app is free to download and install. The server software has two versions: the public and the pro version.

The public version is free to use without a license as long as the user abides by the terms of the license.

This version can be downloaded free from the Ventrilo web site and installed. The pro version is intended for businesses that have a legitimate business license in their country. Proof of that is required. The pro version is not available for download, and is obtained only after approval from the Ventrilo company. You need to apply and sign it with the necessary proof, which they will vet and eventually approve. Then the server license if offered. Pro license holders will host service for at least 1000 clients, and are companies that wish to resell the server slots to individuals.

So if you want to use the service without bothering about hosting a server, you need to rent one from one the approved Ventrilo servers. You have an official list there, from which you can choose one based on your location.

If you want to install a server and run it on your machine, you can do so in less than no time, provided, as stated above, you download and use the server with a free license. Downloading and installation the server software will create a folder on your machine called VentSrv. That name will be in the start menu (considering Windows), and you can click on the Ventrilo Server menu option to open a console window where you can make configurations.

Note that the Ventrilo server app does not have a graphical interface, so tweaks might be a bit complex if you are not used to command line. But all the default settings are commonly those that work without doing anything. You will want to give your friends or other contacts the IP address of your computer running the server so they can use it to connect to your service and communicate. Ventrilo tells you your IP address if you go to that page of theirs.

Downloading and Installing the Client

Make sure you download the right version for the machine you have. You have a range of versions for different platforms, both for server and client on that download page. Installation makes some configurations automatically so that you can be up and running quickly. To be able to use the client, you need to know and feed in the server’s host name and IP address; the server’s port number which is 3784 by default unless the administrator has changed it; the server’s password. Once you entered these credentials, you can start using the Ventrilo client.