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

Too many choices

[bonch]

Nice to see an amicable fork; it sounds like this will mean competition for GnomeMeeting.

Great, more "competition." See my sig.

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:Too many choices

[sglane81]

Competition drives innovation.

Re:Too many choices

[sirsnork]

The way I see this fork is basically like an unstable branch of the linux kernel. This way they can just work on the video and voice without messing up gaims normal development and without having to work out why something has broken because someone else applied a patch for something unrelated that breaks it. This way the only patches applied with be fore video and voice, and once thats working properly they can drop it into the current devel branch and make it work

Re:Too many choices

[RAMMS EIN]

``I don't want voice or video chat. I talk to people in real life or via phonograph.''

Do write a plugin for that, so that us Gaim users can have it too!

Re:Too many choices

[MikeFM]

There is nothing wrong with H.323. It's just that the IM companies like to use their own protocols so they can lock users in. I'd like to see support for all of those protocols and H.323.

Re:Too many choices

[hak1du]

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_.

Those are also the protocols that are under the control of companies with their own financial interests. How long do you think those companies are going to provide access to open source clients when those services don't fit into their business plan and stop looking like attractive business propositions anymore?

GnomeMeeting and H.323 are easy to use. They talk to existing video conferencing hardware, give you full control over how you connect and what directory services you use, and easily run even serverless. If you use AIM/iChat, MSN, Yahoo, or any of the others, it's just stupid.

At the very least, let's hope that GAIM-vv will provide full access to standards-based H.323 video conferencing, in addition to its support for proprietary services. But it really should pop up a big warning dialog every time anybody uses AIM, MSN, or Yahoo!: "This service may be discontinued or become unavailable without warning any day. [OK?]".

Re:Too many choices

[hak1du]

The situation is similar, and it's a reason to avoid closed-source software, but it's not quite the same. Most closed-source software keeps running even if is discontinued. So, you can keep running WordPerfect on DOS for years if you like, until the hardware breaks or you get tired of it. With a proprietary service, things can stop working without warning from one day to the next.

Re:Too many choices

[hachete]

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

Re:Too many choices

[Joe Tie.]

Great, more "competition." See my sig.

What your sig gets wrong though is that there is no generic lump of 'people'. I'm a person, and I do want an endless amount of choices. It's one of the reasons I use Linux. Now if your sig read 'the average computer user considering using Linux dosn't want an endless amount of choices', then I'd agree. And I'd also not really care what they want. We've got a high enough user base to get the occasional port of games, and 3D drivers - that's more than enough for what I want. Past that, why should I care about more people using the same operating system as me than I'd care about people using the same brand of sock? Especially if to get them to wear that sock, it'd have to be shrunk to a level uncomfortable for my foot.

I wish...

[JThundley]

I just wish the devs would make something that they could be proud to call a 1.0 release.
But then again, this software is their gift to me, I have no room to bitch :)

Re:I wish...

[scmason]

Are you missing the entire point of post? It is open source, you don't have to wrestle control from anyone. Just take it, fix it and use it. If your changes are useful, they will make it back into the product, or you can start your own fork.

Duh. ..

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:I wish...

[RAMMS EIN]

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.

Re:I wish...

[ChipX86]

Non-conformist? Perhaps. How would you define a 1.0 release? How can we? Development on this program can never end, and what makes a 1.0 release is a matter of opinion only. If we did release a 1.0, we'd hear from so many people how it wasn't ready for one. There's no reason to. If people don't use gaim because of it, that's fine. We have plenty of people who do use it, but we're not in it for the popularity contest stuff. We're in it because we want a good IM client to use. Scratching an itch.

Re:I wish...

[AvantLegion]

What possible purpose does avoiding 1.0 intentionally serve?

good thing

[jangell]

The way I look at it, this could be a very good thing.. From what I've witnessed currently the gaim development team is busy with many things, and cannot focus on one or two certain features.

Now that It has forked off the developers that are interested in this will have the time to do the one thing they WANT to do, not a bunch of others.

The way I look at it, it is kind of like the introduction of the assembly line, a group will be very skilled at one task and not be working on and assembleing all the other features.

Quite frankly, This is one feature gaim is really lacking. With the introduction of broadband services in the home, video and voice is extremely popular.

It's hard to get someone to try linux when their main tasks cannot be performed.

This is a very good thing.

Re:good thing

[RAMMS EIN]

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.

Re:good thing

[LostCluster]

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.

Yes. However there's competiting formats for realtime video chat right now... and the so called "open standards" seem to be ignored. GAIM's point is to emulate the proprietary formats that haven't been released for Linux yet.

iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[metalligoth]

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.

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:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[hak1du]

Also, I have lots of x86 using friends that hate booting into Windows from Linux just to use advertising-ridden AIM.

The ads are part of their business model. If lots of people switch to using open, ad-free clients, they'll eventually just decide to keep those clients from connecting. That's the trouble with using software that relies on proprietary protocols and proprietary servers.

I know it's less convenient, but try to get your friends to use chatting (in particular, video chatting) using open protocols. There are technically perfectly good choices: H.323, Jabber, etc. People just have to use them more. And the longer AIM becomes entrenched, the harder it will get to change.

Just imaging what E-mail would be like if it had started like chatting--with AOL, Microsoft, and a few others controling the servers and the infrastructure. Ultimately, ISPs should provide IM servers just like they provide mail servers.

Uh oh...

[larley]

I just realized. Seeing as the true geeks use open source and all, that'll just give us one less reason to go out and be social... As soon as they develop a usb-automated back scratcher and/or fridge/microwave, I'm not leaving the house!

Re:Uh oh...

[flynns]

..you leave your house to scratch your back and cook/refrigerate your food?

hmm.

GAIM UI

[BESTouff]

That's nice, I hope they'll take GnomeMeeting's UI as an example. Gaim'UI sucks big time : it has tons of windows opening for no reason, taking the focus (and the keyboard input) from what you were previously doing. Way too much intrusive if you ask me.

Re:GAIM UI

[RAMMS EIN]

Use the preferences, dude.

I personally thing Gaim has one of the _nicest_ UIs around. I group all chats and conversations in one tabbed window, so that I never have to worry about things popping up again.

Want chats in a separate window? Click the checkbox. Want every conversation in a separate window, but all chats in one tabbed window? It can be done. Pretty much any imaginable combination is possible.

Re:GAIM UI

[ratsnapple tea]

This is probably going to come off as another one of those annoying "leap to Apple's defense at all costs!" posts, but what the hell.

It's true that iChat's incoming IM windows pop up on top of all your other windows, but it's not a nuisance at all. It's ghosted out, for one thing, so you can tell it's not a "real" window, and it doesn't take focus away from anything else you're working on. If you want it to obey normal stacking order, just click on it (making it a "normal" window) and then click back on whatever you were working on. No problem. Intuitive. Easy.

I happen to think iChat's interface is actually the best of any client I've ever tried, but that's another matter...

Recent problems with Gaim

[cerberusss]

We use Gaim to communicate with the offshore part of the team and I have to say I couldn't really miss it. But I did have to, since they didn't react to the changes that Yahoo required from clients. It took a looooong time (almost three months) for Gaim to get fixed. Although we use Yahoo's network, Yahoo's own Linux client doesn't run in Xinerama (multihead) mode. The last six weeks, an unofficial patch floated around which had its own problems but at least a connection was made. Only this week, a new release was done which solved all problems.

Re:Recent problems with Gaim

[mkamp]

If you want a closed group like for team communication, why don't you go for jabber? You could setup your own server in seconds (at least with debian: apt-get install jabber), have your own rooms and don't have to bother too much about the internet and firewalls.

It is truly open source. That includes the protocol, most client-apis, most clients and most servers.
Furthermore the core is already in IETF RFCs.

No need to worry about vendors checking the protocols anymore and a wide variety of clients to use.

Watch out, your favorite IDE might even get a plug-in for IMing.

Re:How useful is that?

[RAMMS EIN]

Not unless your webcam is supported... :-/

another fork?

[master0ne]

and this makes how many forks of gaim now? lets see we have gaim, ayttm, everybuddy, and gaim-vv, are there any im missing? sounds like a poll to me... "whats your favorite linux messanger client? aim, yahoo, ayttm, everybuddy, gaim, gaim-vv, cowboy neal's all-in-one messanger. ytalk, or i dont chat you insensitive clod!"

anyway in all seriousness ayttm (are you talking to me) look it up on freshmeat (as im too lazy/tired to link it) already has rudimentry yahoo webcam support, however it is still lacking, i loved trillian for windows, and would like to see gaim go in that direction, with all the eyecandy and skins and plugins... i know, ill learn c and fork gaim myself!!

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...

Re:another fork?

[camh]

The word fork is being a bit overused lately because some high profile projects have forked recently.
This is not a fork of gaim - since it is planned to merge the changes back into gaim, it is just a branch. Branches are quite common when you want to add substantial features to a program, because it isolates those new features from the mainline until it is ready, and development of minor features can continue on the mainline.
You can call it a fork if you want, but I think that is just sensationalising what is just a development branch.

Re:another fork?

[BluesMoon]

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.

Woot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Exciting news indeed.

Gaim is the only decent AIM client for I've run across for Windows - the official client is utter crap, and Trillian is bloated payware. Still, some of my less-technically-inclined friends refuse to use Gaim, citing the fact that it doesn't have enough cool features and "bling bling". With cool new features like these, I have more ammunition in my battle to get people to switch ;p

Now, if only the Gaim folks would get their act together on MSN support ...

Re:Woot!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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:Well, not everyone's favourite

[RAMMS EIN]

Gaim evolves quickly. File transfers work both ways for at least AIM and IRC (I wrote the IRC support based on the AIM code), and I think the MSN and Yahoo plugins have been able to at least receive files for a long time now, so chances are they can also send files now.

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[opello]

'chances are' ? not quite ... at least for me using latest 'stable'

i'd like to see support for msn pics, like amsn
i don't keep up with the drama that is gaim so i don't know if they are planning on implimenting it or not

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.

Re:Skype?

[ChiralSoftware]

Skype for Linux is on its way, and it can't be here soon enough for me. If you look on their site in the jobs section, they are looking for a Linux/QT programmer. Older versions of Skype ran under Wine, but apparently they are now doing some code relocation/decryption thing that breaks with Wine, so we just have to wait for the official Linux client. And if it's Qt, it will look good and integrate nicely with Suse 9.1 which is also almost here...

----------
Create a WAP server

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.

This is not a fork.

[Craig Davison]

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>

wrong project

[pdamoc]

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.

not at all the same thing

[hak1du]

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.

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.

ah, wonderful...

[boola-boola]

This is one feature I've been waiting for. Hopefully it will be compatible with iChat AV, since that is my main method of voice chatting over the internet.

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)

Stable?

[prandal]

GAIM for Windows has been plagued with stability problems from 0.74 onwards, with the MSN protocol being unusable (unless you like GAIM crashing out when people message you). Fortunately, it seems to be fixed in the 0.77 release.

Since I run Debian...

[Glowing Fish]

Since I run Debian, I should read Slashdot from a year or so ago, to read about all the latest programs I can apt-get.

Re:Since I run Debian...

[ocelotbob]

debian stable is like that, but that's because it is designed to be just that, rock stable. Debian unstable or testing, however, are pretty current; unstable's got 2.6.5 and everything now.

Re:Since I run Debian...

[Blackknight]

Or you could switch to testing/unstable and run the latest stuff.

I run Sarge on my workstation at work and it is rock solid.

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[fdobbie]

MSN certainly cannot send or receive files at the moment, but people are working on it.

In fact....

[Kjella]

Sorry. Remember though that a stable, full-featured program doesn't have to be labeled 1.0.

...I'd call it an extremely rare occurance. You have the "nothing is ever perfect"-camp which are at 0.x permanently, and the "ship now, fix later" which definately don't qualify at 1.0. Only projects with a reasonable balance of both kinds seem to hit 1.0 well, OSS or commercial...

Kjella

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[Queuetue]

In general, the #gaim regulars are a bunch of jackasses. The latest stable, .76 has an annoying bug where if notifies you and asks for a response in the event that it needs to reconnect. This in turn raises problems with metacity, which gives focus to any new window, and now reconnection, instead of being something that happens magically behind the scenes by magic, is a 20-second clickfest of annoyance popups, randomly interrupting work.

Mentioning this topic (or any other user-centric topic) in #gaim will get you kicked pretty quickly .

I say the more forks (although this does not appear to be a fork) the better - there are several user-centric forks of GAIM, and hopefully one of them will stick.

ObStarTrek

[geminidomino]

"Helloooo computer... ah, a keyboard... how quaint..."

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[Doug Neal]

Why did this get modded down?

I switched from Gaim to Kopete when KDE 3.2 was released. It fits in better with the rest of my KDE desktop and seems a bit more complete.. it's got all the protocol support gaim has. One particularly nice feature is meta-contacts. If you've got the same person under multiple protocols you can add them to the same meta-contact and they only show up in the list once.

Also supports MSN display pictures and file transfers (although they have a habit of aborting halfway through so no good for big files), and unlike gaim it not only notifies you when the other person closes the chat window, it notifies you when they open one too, before they've even typed anything... people can get very suprised when they open a window and I speak first :)

More features

[Espectr0]

Hey devs! How about file send and receive and display pictures for all protocols, please? Pretty please?

Re:Everyone's favorite messenger?

[binford2k]

Can make a tray icon on minimizing, but can't remove task bar icon.

Don't minimize it, close the window.

ayttm

[BluesMoon]

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.