Gaim Forks To Get Voice And Video Support

RAMMS+EIN writes "Everyone's favorite instant messenger, Gaim, has recently been forked. The new gaim-vv project aims to provide voice and video chat support, which will eventually be backported into the main branch." Nice to see an amicable fork; it sounds like this will mean competition for GnomeMeeting.

Comments

Re:Too many choices

[RAMMS EIN]

Right, people don't want to be swamped with options, but they do want to have voice and video chat.

The comment about GnomeMeeting is quite inaccurate, as GnomeMeeting uses the H.323 protocol, which was used by Netmeeting and old versions of MSN Messenger, but is not used by any messengers these days. What gaim-vv aims to provide is voice and video chat with AIM/iChat, MSN, Yahoo, etc, that is, the protocols that people actually _use_.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[RAMMS EIN]

``Is it compatible with Apple's iChat AV / AIM's video and audio chatting?''

That's the idea. However, an idea is all there is for now. AFAIK, all major IMs use proprietary protocols for voice and video that have not been reverse engineered yet.

Re:I wish...

[ChipX86]

We won't have a 1.0 release. Our version number is just the previous number + 1, so a 1.0 just isn't going to happen :) Sorry. Remember though that a stable, full-featured program doesn't have to be labeled 1.0.

Re:another fork?

[RAMMS EIN]

I may be wrong, but AFAIK ayttm is a everybuddy fork and everybuddy is not based on the Gaim codebase. They are very similar, though. Traditionally, eb has had the features and Gaim the stability. I wish they would cooperate more...

iChat uses H.263

[FreeHeel]

from Apple:

iChat AV uses the industry-standard H.263 video codec and advanced pre- and post-processing techniques to deliver picture-perfect video. It uses the sophisticated technologies built into QuickTime to compress the video and audio while maintaining rich detail, natural colors, and smooth video over any 100-Kbps or faster Internet connection. Specific technologies include:

• Spatial anisotropic diffusion to maintain edge detail and sharpness while reducing unnecessary digital "noise."
• Temporal noise reduction to average out noise between video frames while avoiding motion blurring.
• Post-filtering of the received video to avoid blockiness and ringing artifacts.

iChat AV uses a sophisticated digital audio codec to deliver the same crystal-clear audio quality that you expect when you use a typical landline telephone. The fullduplex technology built into iChat AV lets you have natural conversations, just as with the advanced speakerphones found in conference boardrooms. Most other solutions force users to talk one at a time, providing an experience more akin to talking on a CB radio.

Apple has recently announced support for H.264, which is a good thing

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[lorien420]

Clearly you never spent any time in the #gaim irc channel. Before .60 went out of the door, Gentoo offered a gaim-cvs which had many many bugs. This is because they were using a cvs version of gaim. These people would use this and then go to #gaim to complain about it not working, often many times an hour. This created MASSIVE amounts of frustration, because the Gentoo users had absolutely no clue about anything involving gaim's cvs development of .60.

Gaim-vv

[Anonymous Coward]

Gaim-vv is really more of an offsite branch of Gaim than a fork.

From the sf project page:
A friendly fork of Gaim (http://gaim.sf.net) to concentrate on video and voice support, which will eventually be backported

Basicly, I wrote a patch based on some code from libyahoo2 for Gaim to allow viewing other people's webcams. Filamoon independently had done some on msn voice and video related stuff. We decided to start a separate sourceforge project so we could collaborate and stuff.

Eventually we hope to merge it into Gaim proper. Currently it's in a state where it may be useful to users, but not in a state where it can be merged into Gaim. It breaks the core/ui split for example. It uses threads for some things. There's not really any shared code between the Yahoo! and MSN related features yet.

There are no AIM, iChat, ICQ, Jabber, IRC, Gadu-Gadu, Napster, Zephyr, etc, video or voice features. Someone wishing to work on that should contact us and start coding.

I don't consider gaim-vv to be in competition with any other project, GnomeMeeting or otherwise.

i'm the one

[radoni]

supposed to be adding video transmit support for y! webcam. my computers (yes plural) recently had a meltdown of some kind. don't hold your breath.

those who are interested, i'm sure the help would be welcomed. scope is video and voice. contact marv (#gaim / freenode)

of note is the libj2k completely GNU GPL jpeg2000 library implementation, which avoids the questionably-incompatible licensing and free-as-in-freedom issues of libjasper.

there's a lot of msn/linphone work in there too.

for those of you have worked on patching Direct IM images to work again, gaim-vv would be the place to get that committed. hint, hint.

cheers.