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Logitech MSN Webcam Codec Reverse-Engineered
Alexis Boulva writes "Tonight, Ole André Vadla Ravnås of the Farsight project (LGPL), which 'is an audio/video conferencing framework specifically designed for Instant Messengers' for the GNU Linux operating system, finished coding a release candidate of libmimic, 'an open source video encoding/decoding library for Mimic V2.x-encoded content (fourCC: ML20), which is the encoding used by MSN Messenger
for webcam conversations.' Ole, on the libmimic site, remarks that 'It should be noted that reverse-engineering for interoperability is 100%
legal here in Norway (and in most European countries).' Looks like the Free/Open Source Software movement is very close to closing up one of the most noticeable software gaps remaining from its glorious efforts."
Gnomemeeting already played very nice with Microsoft's Netmeeting, present in almost every Windows box, sound and video included.
This site has links to sites with linux drivers for several Logitech webcams... It's thanks to this site that I got my "QuickCam Messenger" working in linux... IMO it's running better in linux... But no big surprise, there, eh...
We're currently debating wether to implement the new copyright etc laws though. (and be 'we' I mean fringe left and some computer scientists complaining, while the main stream press keep their daily schedule of reporting fairly amazingly trivial and non-important 'news')
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
Patents. Everyone has his own codec and patents it. Even the "open source" Dirac codec will be patented.
The reason it will be patented is that if they don't, some other company can just go ahead and patent the same thing, and the only way to rectify it is a long and hard court case which will cost lots and lots of $$$.
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For god's sake read the damn article. This is NOT a webcam driver. It is a codec for Mimic V2.x. Which MSN Messenger uses for sending video between PCs.
Why? GnomeMeeting is compatible with Netmeeting on Windows (both use the H.323 protocoll). You can just use that.
Anyway, it would be grat if this project would be somehow implemented by gaim.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
GnomeMeeting is compatible with Netmeeting on Windows
Maybe, but H.323 (the network protocol *meeting uses) doesn't pass through firewalls without an awful lot of effort. It can pass through a Cisco PIX (en expensive, but very good professional firewall), but I don't know a single consumer grade firewall that can pass H.323, which means that at least one of the ends must be unfirewalled (or using firewall software only). In that case, whoever is unfirewalled needs to be the receiver of the call. It's very limiting, and doesn't suit many needs.
gaim-vv is the answer: it's a fork of gaim, specifically created in order to have GAIM capable of doing audio/video conversation.
It relies on external libraries, so the topic's related to the (hopefully near) advances in gaim-vv to support msn and other protocols: as of yesterday you were only able to see other people's webcams from a yahoo! account.
I hope that things will change, now
If anyone can hear me, slap some sense into me But you turn your head, and I end up talking to myself
That may work on one side, and maybe it is a full implementation, but H.323 opens up random ports greater than 20,000, and then communicates this over the control channel. A firewall would have to continually monitor control to keep opening/closing ports as needed.
There might be a legal issue if he disassembled the code...because most license agreements explicitly forbid disassembly, a court may say he used improper means to get the necessary information. That is, even though reverse engineering is legal, you can't violate other obligations.
Most licences prohibit "reverse engineering" too - it's just not enforcable since the local laws explicitly allow reverse engineering. Of course IANAL so I can't tell you if the lagal "reverse engineering for interoperability purposes" also include disassembly. I would think it did.
http://blog.nexusuk.org