VideoChat-7 release

[Sjoerd Simons]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 05:30:38PM +0100, Guillaume Desmottes wrote:
> Le jeudi 18 septembre 2008 à 10:00 -0400, Benjamin M. Schwartz a écrit :
> > Since I do not feel that I, as a US citizen and resident, can safely
> > redistribute this Activity, I would be interested in tweaking it to use
> > h261 or Theora, to see how it performs.
> > 
> 
> That will be possible using Farsight-2 but VideoChat will need to use
> the new libstreamengine which is currently in work in progress.

More precisely, you need Farsight2 if you want to implement Theora, as you
need to send some codec-data out of band before starting the video streams.

Unfortunately afaik theora is still quite heavy for an XO (although some work
is being done there, but i don't know the status of it)

With current stream-engine, you could in theory do h261, but gstreamer
currently doesn't have h261 payloader and depayloader plugins. Also the only
h261 encoder/decoder available for gstreamer are part of ffmpeg, which itself
is in a bit of a legal grey area. If you want to avoid that, you could extra
the h261 implementation ekiga/opal uses and wrap that into a gstreamer plugin.

This is all very doable, but unfortunately not just simple tweaking.

But it's very important to note that VideoChat itself shouldn't/doesn't link
directly to any patented code, you only get that it you install the extra
plugins. With purely the base set of gstreamer plugins, you should still be
able to setup a audio-only call (Assuming the VideoChat ui handles that
correctly).

  Sjoerd
-- 
There is no cure for birth and death other than to enjoy the interval.
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