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Logitech MSN Webcam Codec Reverse-Engineered

Posted by timothy on from the until-lotus-won't-run dept.

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."

5 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. Re:video conf between windows and Linux ??? by Sodki · · Score: 5, Informative

    Gnomemeeting already played very nice with Microsoft's Netmeeting, present in almost every Windows box, sound and video included.

  2. Re:Just great. by Alexis+Boulva · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

  3. Re:Just how many video codecs do we need? by aldoman · · Score: 4, Informative

    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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  4. Re:Wonderful! by Simon+(S2) · · Score: 4, Informative
    but I used to have to boot into Windows at home every weekend so that I could actually SEE my girlfriend.


    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.
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  5. Re:Wonderful! by ilithiiri · · Score: 5, Informative
    Anyway, it would be grat if this project would be somehow implemented by gaim.


    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 ;)
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