How do you encode captured audio into <whatever>? Are there some build-in encoders in gstreamer and you're using it, or you just pass result of whole pipeline to Vorbis encoder?
AIUI, video that we get (and send) during video call, is already compressed for sending through internet
But, I agree, that it doesn't sounds like priority functionality in Orecch'.
Would it be possible, to allow choosing quality (either 8 kHz or 16 kHz, IIRC) for speex?