Voice IM project proposal

[Sjoerd Simons]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2007 at 11:21:59AM -0500, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
> > 4. Longer description       : Support voice conversation using voice IM
> >                             : between any two XO in a local mesh or
> >                             : globally, using the XO presence
> >                             : infrastructure
> 
> This would be welcome.  VoIP has been part of the plan from the beginning, and
> there's even a draft implementation at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Push_to_Talk
> and early discussion at
> http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/22
> 
> VoIP development is currently blocking on Telepathy-Salut, which is our
> serverless communication manager.  Telepathy-Salut does not yet implement any
> real-time channels (e.g. RTP), so there is no clean way to build VoIP into the
> presence infrastructure when not connected to the global internet.

That is quite an overstatement. It is true that salut at currently doesn't
support the telepathy interfaces needed for video conferencing. Which does
indeed mean we can't do VOIP when not connected to the internet at this point.
Adding jingle support on salut is planned, but untill now we had other
priorities :)

This does not mean VOIP development is blocked on salut though.. Gabble does
support the needed bits for VOIP. So you can continue work on the Video Chat
application right now, without needing to wait on salut. Also thanks to the
beauty of the telepathy design, as soon as salut starts support VOIP, it will
work with the VOIP activity without any changes. So this work can be done in
parallel.

And last but not least, Connection manager never implement RTP or other real
time channels themselves, they just do the signalling. All the actual work of
sending and receiving the media is done by another component called
stream-engine which is independant of the protocol used for signalling.


  Sjoerd
-- 
Life exists for no known purpose.