ipCam was primarily developed in response to a large number of our iCam users wanting to use their old iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches as cameras for the iCamSource.
The feature set was modeled after other network IP cameras available on the market, specifically the ones made by AirLink101, TrendNET, and Foscam, which are the ones primarily used by other iCam users.
All of those cameras support audio using the
ADPCM codec which was developed as a low-bandwidth codec used in early voice over IP (VoIP) applications. It is a low-quality protocol.
The latency you are experiencing is an issue with your web browser. The browsers seem to want to cache the HTML 5 audio until it feels it has enough to start playing instead of playing it as soon as it receives it. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about that issue. There is very little latency when using ipCam with iCam and the iCamSource.
There are higher-quality audio encodings available, but most of them are nowhere near real-time. (MP3, AAC, etc.) Using full, uncompressed, high-quality PCM would have extreme bandwidth limitations.
The one codec natively supported by Apple's iDevices that would be better suited for real-time streaming audio is
iLBC but no web browsers support it. (That is the codec we used with
iChatr.)