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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.
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
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_.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Competition drives innovation.
This is the Internet. You can say "fuck" here. - AC
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.
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.
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!
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.
Exciting news indeed.
;p
...
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
Now, if only the Gaim folks would get their act together on MSN support
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...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Apple has recently announced support for H.264, which is a good thing
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.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
``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!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
"[We'll be] really getting inside your head and making it an unpleasant place to be" -- Trent Reznor
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.
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.
Linux, because booting is for adding hardware.
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.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
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.
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.
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
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.
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.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
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.