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."

Comments

Re:video conf between windows and Linux ???

[Sodki]

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

Re:Just great.

[Alexis Boulva]

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...

Re:Wonderful!

[ilithiiri]

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 ;)