Voice IM project proposal

[Sjoerd Simons]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2007 at 11:42:56AM -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> 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.

This seems a bit confused.. When using VOIP with gabble, you use the jingle
standard to negotiate the codecs used. The actual audio/video data is obviously
transmitted via out of bound (any other way doesn't make sense).. This is how
voip calling works on for example the N800 using jabber/google talk.

Telepathy also has a SIP CM, but it doesn't make much sense to me to use that
just for signalling while XMPP can do the signalling just fine :)

> >    * 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.

Codecs are indeed the bigger issue.. #1491 does contain some usefull
information about the diferent possibilities.. But imho getting theora to rock
on the XO would be great (and not just for video conferencing)

  Sjoerd
-- 
The moss on the tree does not fear the talons of the hawk.