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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."

3 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. Reverse Engineered From The Disassembly by Pants75 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    So for fun, and challenge, I reverse-engineered the original implementation by studying the massive amount of assembly code involved, and after a lot of hard work I ended up with this implementation in C.

    Nice, gotta give the guy props for that.

    That is not a trivial undertaking at all.

    I tip my hat to ya.

    Pete

  2. Why not use ichat/AIM's video protocol? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    > 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

    Why not use ichat/AIMs video protocol. It's a fully open standard, described completely on Apple's developer site. All there ready to go.

    Or is it more important to chase what Windows does, rather than what Works?

  3. Re:Wonderful! by dmayle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    access to young 18+ sluts on webcam

    Yeah, sure, that's funnay and all, but for anyone with friends, significant others, family distant from them, this is a godsend. I use Linux every day at work, and at home, but I used to have to boot into Windows at home every weekend so that I could actually SEE my girlfriend.

    You see, I live in France, while my now-ex lived in the U.S. On the upside, I'm now dating a French girl, but I'd still like to be able to see my mother, and my sister and brother-in-law. This way, I don't have to boot into Windows at all... (And even when if I ever have to, I'd prefer GAIM on Windows any day over MSN, which is so limiting)