Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.