TeamSpeak v Vent v Mumble

[Jesung]

I was reading article on WoW insider and it seems that Teamspeak has fallen completely out of favour within the WoW/gaming market. I was just wondering is there major differences between TS, Vent and Mumble and if so what are the reasons that we are still using TS?

This is not me suggesting we should change I am just curious

[TeaLeaf]

The long and the short of this imo is: the article you read is based on the market reputation built up by TS2.  
TS2 sound quality used to be worse than Vent until TS3 was released, which is why people paid for Ventrillo (TS2 was pre-Mumble days).  Now that TS3 is up and running there is a change and there is no longer a clear quality advantage to Vent when compared to TS3.  The short summary is:

Vent is a paid for licence which costs per month depending on number of slots.  Sound quality and feature set is good.
Teamspeak2 was free, but sounded poor compared to Ventrillo and could not bind wheel buttons as push to talk (see dMr section for more info).  Feature set is ok, but not great.
Teamspeak3 is a paid for licence, but we have a free 500 slot licence as we are a not-for-profit organisation.  TS3 is a total different animal to TS2 and now is fully featured with different codecs and no sound quality issues or wheel button bind issues etc.
Mumble is a good open source voice comms package, decently featured with excellent latency (better than TS3 or Vent).

One of Ventrilo's biggest issues was the queued delay in voice comms.  I've not done scientific testing on this, but I've raided on Vent & on TS and when on Vent have experienced much larger delays (and often queued audio) between something being said and it being heard by users.  TS3 has less problems with this imo due to the slightly different way it transmits data.  Normal latency on both is something like 1 second (but no queue-stacked audio on TS3).

I have less experience with Mumble and it is certainly a lower latency solution.  However:

-it requires us to install and maintain another application on the server (not necessarily a problem)
-it means that the current 'single home' for the community is split across 2 different voice applications.

That second one is a biggy.  It's real nice to be able to swap between the sim racers of dMr, to the FPS folks in the BC2 channel, then back into DMR's WOW channels all on the same TS3 server.

[Twyst]

My previous guild used Mumble and had zero issues with it's use.
However, one BIG point in it's favour is that it overlays the WoW game screen with a list of nicks on Mumble and highlights who is talking. Which is handy for newcomers. However, that doesn't work on 64-bit Linux running 32-bit WoW which makes it useless for me personally, but hey ho.
As TS3 now has a decent native Linux client, my prior gripes with TS2 have all evaporated.

TLDR: I'm happy with either Mumble or TS3 right now.