molluskandClaude Opus 4.8
b4a4c00711
The first cut used a fixed 1.05x drain, which measurement showed was too gentle to matter: clearing a 6 s backlog would take two minutes, which a viewer experiences as still broken. Two changes, both measured on the netem satellite rig (loopback impairment, gst -> ffmpeg HTTP relay -> mpv, matching the http:// URL production actually serves): 1. Proportional drain. Speed now scales with buffer depth, 1 + 0.05*(cache - 0.5), clamped to 1.15x, keeping the hysteresis band so it cannot oscillate. Deep backlogs recover in tens of seconds; small excursions still get an inaudible nudge. 2. Bound the byte cache in Low latency. The demuxer cache is a *byte* budget, so at a given bitrate it sets the worst-case backlog: 2 MiB held ~6 s of a 2.5 Mbps share. Capping Low latency at 1 MiB halved the standing buffer, 6.0 s -> 2.8 s, on its own. Smooth keeps the user's value, since a deep buffer is that posture's whole point. Measured effect with both: playback consumes 11.6% faster than realtime while behind (ratio 1.1157 vs 0.9988 with catch-up off), i.e. ~9 s of backlog cleared in 80 s where before it recovered nothing at all and the viewer stayed behind for the rest of the call. Rig caveat: its upstream queues hold an unbounded backlog, so the cache never drops back through the low mark and the return-to-1x transition is only covered by unit tests, not the rig. 601 lib tests green, clippy clean. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
PeerSpeak
Decentralized, peer-to-peer voice chat — full-mesh, NAT-traversing, with no central server. Built in Rust on iroh (QUIC), PipeWire audio, the Opus codec, and an iced GUI.
Create a room, share the join ticket, and talk. Everyone connects directly to everyone else; relays are only used to punch through NATs when a direct path isn't available.
Screenshots
| Launch screen | In a room |
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| Settings |
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Features
Rooms & sessions
- Create a room → shareable join ticket; join by pasting a ticket.
- Full-mesh multi-peer rooms with live presence.
- Recent-rooms list to hop back into a room someone's still in.
- Remembered nickname and in-call duration timer.
Audio
- PipeWire capture/playback, selectable input and output devices, per-app gain.
- Opus codec (48 kHz mono, 20 ms frames) with an adaptive jitter buffer + packet-loss concealment.
- Noise gate with a draggable threshold on a live mic meter (test your mic off-call too).
- Mix-bus soft limiter and opt-in echo cancellation (PipeWire WebRTC AEC + noise suppression).
Voice controls
- Self-mute, deafen, and rebindable push-to-talk.
- Per-peer volume, local mute, and speaking indicators.
Text chat
- In-room text chat over the gossip plane, with clickable links and inline image/audio attachments.
- Drag-selectable, copyable messages; right-click context menu on all text fields.
Shared music listening
- Build a personal playlist of local audio files with a full transport (play/pause, seek, reorder).
- Let others tune in: peers stream your current track, timeline-synced and gapless, sitting under voice at their own volume.
Screen share (via pixelpass)
- Share your screen; peers click 👁 Watch to open the stream in mpv (vlc fallback).
- Live badges on sharing peers; per-app audio capture.
Recording & notifications
- Local call recording (mic + incoming mix → WAV in
~/peerspeak-recordings/). - Desktop notifications and event chimes with per-event custom sound overrides.
UI & networking
- Selectable room layouts (3-Column, Bottom Dock, Drawer) with draggable, persisted dividers.
- 10 built-in themes (Catppuccin, Dracula, Nord, Tokyo Night, Gruvbox, Solarized…), all WCAG-AA checked.
- Network mode picker (relay-no-discovery default, full n0, or direct-only); retained-address reconnect.
- Config, window size/position, and all preferences persisted to
~/.config/peerspeak/.
See docs/FEATURES.md for the full inventory and field-test status, and docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for internals.
Roadmap
- Contacts & invites — friends list with invite-notification one-click join (design in
docs/contacts-plan.md). - Spatial audio & per-peer EQ.
- Soundboard — play short clips into the call mix.
- Room persistence / invite links beyond the raw ticket.
- Windows support — cross-compiles and launches under Wine today; needs a real WASAPI audio pass (see
docs/WINDOWS.md).
Building
PeerSpeak builds with a stable Rust toolchain (edition 2024). Install the system dependencies below, then:
cargo build --release
./target/release/peerspeak
System dependencies
Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S --needed rust pipewire opus pkgconf git
Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config clang libclang-dev \
libpipewire-0.3-dev libopus-dev libasound2-dev libxcb1-dev
Plus a Rust toolchain via rustup. clang/libclang are needed for the PipeWire bindings (bindgen).
At runtime you need a running PipeWire server. Screen sharing additionally requires pixelpass on your PATH, and mpv (or vlc) to watch a peer's share.
Packaging
- Arch:
cd packaging && makepkg -si(usespackaging/PKGBUILD). - Debian/Ubuntu:
.debis built withcargo-debfrom the[package.metadata.deb]block inCargo.toml. Build inside a Debian/Ubuntu environment so the binary links that distro's glibc. - Windows: see
docs/WINDOWS.md.
License
PeerSpeak is licensed under the MIT License, © 2026 mollusk.
Third-party components bundled with PeerSpeak (the Rust dependency tree, the
statically bundled Opus codec on some builds, and embedded fonts) are all under
permissive licenses; their texts and a full dependency manifest are collected in
THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.