VideoChat Installation procedure

[Stephen Thorne]

I have done some investigation into how to get VideoChat to work in 8.2-760.
I have been unable to get it working in 8.1 releases, due to a dependancy
problem. Telepathy-stream-engine relies on a later version of glib than is
provided in fedora 7.

These are the steps I used:

There is a set of RPMs here, and VideoChat-4.xo:
http://people.collabora.co.uk/~cassidy/olpc-video-chat/

Download them all and put them on an XO.

Perform the following commands as root:
# rpm -Uvh *.rpm

As a user, using the Terminal activity do the following:
$ sugar-install-bundle VideoChat-4.xo

Because gstreamer defaults to using 'v4lsrc' instead of 'v4l2src', and the
UI for changing gstreamer defaults is not shipped, it is necessery to run
gconftool-2 to change the default video source. Run this command as the
'olpc' user:

$ gconftool-2 --type string -s /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/videosrc
v4l2src

In order to avoid having to do this in future, a patch to
gstreamer-plugins-good to change DEFAULT_VIDEOSRC to v4l2src is required. I
am looking into how to do that currently.

Configure your XO using Control Panel -> Network -> Mesh, to point to a
server such as 'xochat.org'. All XOs that you want to chat between must be
on the same server. You may not use VideoChat if you do not have
connectivity to this server.

Restart Sugar when prompted.

Start the VideoChat application from the menu (icon is a speech bubble with
an eye in it).

At this point, if someone is on the jabber server you are connected to that
is also running VideoChat, you will see their XO icon and their name next to
the preview window on the bottom left. If you click on an icon, the Activity
will immediately stop updating the preview window, and the camera will stop
operating.

It seems that the provided rpm of gstreamer-plugins-farsight does not
contain the required 'icesrc' gstreamer plugin. I am investigating why this
plugin is missing from the package now.

In order to get debug output from the telepathy-stream-engine (the guts of
the network communication and video conferencing used by VideoChat) you need
to do the following in a Terminal, as the olpc user:

$ killall telepathy-stream-engine
$ STREAM_ENGINE_LOGFILE=se.log /usr/libexec/telepathy-stream-engine &
sugar-launch VideoChat

Afterwards, se.log will contain logs about what happened.

Example logfile is here: http://suqld.org.au/~stephen/se.log

-- 
Stephen Thorne

"Give me enough bandwidth and a place to sit and I will move the world."
--Jonathan Lange
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