Voice IM project proposal

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2007-12-12 at 10:39 -0500, Chris Ball wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>    > We do already have a video-chat activity under development - due to
>    > priorities it hasn't been updated in a while but collaboration on
>    > that would be welcome.
> 
> In particular I think the problems with video-chat were:
> 
>    * There's no stream/VOIP support in Gabble (or was it Salut?)

Well, you really, really want to do the video/voip stuff out-of-band WRT
the jabber-based communication protocols that salut & gabbled do.  So
you use the presence system to _find_ the other person you want to talk
to (or use SIP or whatever), but you have to use some other mechanism
than jabber to actually talk to that person.  So neither Gabble nor
Salut are actually involved in any of this.

>    * We don't have a video codec to use!  We don't think we can handle
>      the CPU load of encoding and decoding Theora in real time.  The
>      previous videoconferencing demo used h.263, but we're guessing we
>      can't ship that for patent reasons (although I don't think anyone's
>      done the research?).

There are three versions of H.263:  H.263, H.263+ and H.263/2000 (or
H.263++).  The first one and second might be usable, but H.263/2000 is
totally unusable for legal/patent reasons.

And, of course, it would be best to work on getting the Theora
encoder/decoder working faster for the XO hardware to ensure that
there's a completely free, open, and unencumbered solution available.

Dan

> If anyone's willing to hack on this, I think it'd be a really useful
> project.  Video conferencing was a killer demo when we hooked it up
> a year ago, it'd be a shame not to be able to offer it.
> 
> The GIT source for the Video Chat activity is:
> 
>    http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=projects/video-chat-activity;a=summary
> 
> - Chris.