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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.
Personally, I'm a kopete fan...
Is it compatible with Apple's iChat AV / AIM's video and audio chatting?
If so, that would most certainly rule. iChat AV is awesome, but chatting on the Windows AIM client restricts one to a tiny window, whereas with iChat you can take up the whole screen if you want.
Also, I have lots of x86 using friends that hate booting into Windows from Linux just to use advertising-ridden AIM.
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Of course, Linux has been able to do voice chat and video chat for a long time. I mean, there's speakfreely, rat, GnomeMeeting, ophone, etc, and you can serve streaming MPEGs or such, which is what I used to do.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Honestly, they should have called it 1.0 somewhere around 0.55. That version was stable and did everything it needed to do. The port to GTK2 should have been 2.x; I think the change is major enough to bump up the major version number.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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Create a WAP server
well, this is certainly should be modded "Opinion" and not anything nearing fact...
I installed Gaim for W32 just a few minutes ago. I had installed in a while back and figured it must have gotten better. It had! I was actually impressed with the look and feel that it had.
Unfortunately it certainly wasn't on par with the official Windows client I regularly use...
The client doesn't have a buddy list that starts left justified in the window. There is a large gap between the left side and where the buddy list starts. That means I have to increase the size of the window to stop it from putting a side to side scrollbar at the bottom of the buddy list window. I like AIM to be open all the time and taking up a small piece of screen real estate. Seems like a UI bug to me.
While it does have a feature to show buddy icons in the buddy list area I could certainly do without that. Problem is, when you disable that the font size of the buddy list names becomes really small. I don't need to squint. Why does the size change? On a related note, why are there very large pictures next to the names on the list? I don't need poster sized notifications of how people are signed on. Should be an option to disable that. Seems like a UI bug to me.
It has a lot of settings that are and are not set by default that should be. Want to succeed in the Windows world? Make it user friendly out of the box.
I have to enable a plug-in to control it from the taskbar. Windows users aren't exactly into fooling around with their settings that much. Make it easy out of the box.
During setup there are a lot of options about GTK+/etc. I know what they mean... Windows users will not. Make it easy to understand (either with details or just completely hidden).
I was overly displeased with the client. I certainly believe that the parent was a free software supporter that can't see past the fact that AOL wants to use ads.
Ads on the client don't bother me and they shouldn't bother you. They aren't as intrusive as the oversized buddy list window you need to have to fit all the text in the window without a scroll bar.
YMMV.
It's a branch of the project with AV support. A fork is an entirely new project set off in a new direction from the original codebase. Branches are often created and merged in a development cycle.
</rant>
Hands in my pocket
this shouldn't have been a fork in Gaim but rather a joint venture between developers of IM software to create a library or a set of libraries that will handle the voice and video protocols, this way all the IM software would have benefit.
GnomeMeeting provides standards-based (H.323 and others) video conferencing, the same protocol that is used by many hardware video conferencing system. There are open server implementations that work with GnomeMeeting (e.g., openh323.org). You get full control over your data, your privacy, your CODECs, and your security. And using GnomeMeeting can be as simple as giving the host name of your counterpart.
The "chat" video conferencing add-ons from AOL, Yahoo!, etc., on the other hand, are tied into a proprietary server infrastructure. Using them means that you are becoming dependent on that server infrastructure and that you let those companies control when and how you can use their chat facilities. For example, AOL could just decide to shut down their servers, exclude you from it, or change the way they encode audio or video.
GAIM is, of course, multi-protocol. So, if the GAIM video chat effort does its job right, you should end up with an application that can subsume GnomeMeeting functionality while also giving you access to the proprietary chat networks. But you should always remember that using AIM or Yahoo! for video (just like for chatting) means that you can lose the service at any time, in particular when you are using an open source client to connect.
However, to be honest, I think the one feature GAIM _really_ needs is multithreading. For instance, when I've got multiple windows open, and one (or multiple ones) are using the gaim-encryption plugin, all the other windows/conversations have to wait for _one_ conversation to finish decrypting/encrypting the message before the rest will continue. It's highly annoying, and since most networking libraries are inherently multithreaded, it doesn't seem like it should be a problem. I'm hoping someone can put that in, soon, as I'm pretty sure it will alleviate some of GAIM's performance issues as well. Hell, I can even help debug the threading on the code level, if someone is willing to start a fork. ;-) (hint hint)
We need more choice, but only choices which are not clones of each other. Look at MySQL - it's made good not by being a clone of Oracle but by figuring out the bits people want then backfilling in the rest as it goes along.
h
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Hey devs! How about file send and receive and display pictures for all protocols, please? Pretty please?
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
ayttm has had video support (in msn and yahoo) for a very long time now. Voice support for yahoo has been available in pyVoice Chat.
The main stumbling block in implementing these things has not been technical. It's been the patents that cover the voice and video formats used.
Do not underestimate the value of print statements for debugging.
ayttm isn't so much a fork of everybuddy - it *is* everybuddy. What is now called everybuddy (eb-lite) is a complete rewrite. Ayttm is around to provide users with a workable client until eb-lite matures.
Do not underestimate the value of print statements for debugging.