Cross-Platform Video Chat For Linux? 338
Ethan1701 writes "Some of my friends are using iChat to stay in touch and gap the distance of the Atlantic. I'm feeling left out on my Fedora Gnome based desktop. Is there a good program for Gnome that provides cross-platform instant messaging and video chat? This rules out Skype and aMSN, as well as any other app that's specific for the ICQ/AOL Network. Kopete is for KDE. Pidgin doesn't intend to develop video-chat, I haven't found a plugin for it that provides video, and Gaim-vv hasn't been developed in over two years and is so out of date that it's still going by Gaim and not Pidgin. Do Slashdot readers have an application that meets these needs? Maybe even one that surpasses iChat?"
Real men chat in ascii (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Skype (Score:3, Interesting)
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=961481&cid=24971661 [slashdot.org]
It's not compatible with anything else or uses some standard for anything, it has an encrypted binary of which the code is unknown, it uses encrypted network connections so you don't know what's going on there either, it sends your data around using P2P.
Imho it's the worst kind of IM client there is, except it works.
Wrong attitude. (Score:1, Interesting)
>>Are you doing all this for me for free? If so, I should say "thank you" and not fucking complain.
I am not the OP, but I hate this attitude. A developer myself, full time for very esoteric scientific software, who has given very significantly to open source projects in the past, GNU Octave, users provide valuable feedback (yes, only 1% of time), but you have got to ignore the rest.
Nobody owes me anything for my contributions -- I gave it to society. I don't expect and won't tolerate harassment by users (several people over the years got my email address and kept on asking inappropriate questions - I'm not your own personal tech support), but somebody saying "x used to work, now it doesn't" doesn't rile me up. In the case of Octave, we hope that enterprises can use it as an alternative to the big player (you probably know it.) If the software sucked, it could really mess people up.
So, just ignore the griefers, take what you can from the positive suggestions, and stop self-righteously telling people to shut up.
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I like to use this example: Imagine somebody built a house for habitat for humanity, but then a person complains of a nail sticking up from the floor.
Builder one says, "We built this house for FREE. Shut up and stop complaining!"
Builder two says, "I can hammer it down next week when I get some time, or here is how you can fix it yourself."
Who does more for society? Who is a better person?
I've come across as a bit self-righteous above (oh the irony) -- that was not my intent, just pointing out my own philosophy, which I hold very strongly.
Re:Real men chat in ascii (Score:3, Interesting)
It's more plausible than you may think. If any of the current video chat frameworks use SDL for their output, you can use SDL's AALib output driver. It will automagically mogrify your video into text, live!
Here's the FAQ entry on it: http://www.libsdl.org/faq.php?action=listentries&category=3#30 [libsdl.org]
Re:Patience (Score:3, Interesting)
The fork was started by contributors to Gaim. Many of them lost interest and time in maintaining the fork, which is why it was encouraged that the improvements get merged back into Gaim so that a larger pool of developers could work on them. That merge never happened and the code bitrotted because there was no agreement that it was what we wanted it to be.
The biggest problem had been deciding what software to use for the backend, and ultimately gstreamer with farsight has been chosen.
The version of Gaim-vv that existed was supporting Yahoo, whereas this time the student is implementing a documented voice and video protocol for XMPP and building the framework into Pidgin onto which other protocols' support may be applied.
Some protocols are still impossible because the codecs required don't exist, aren't stable or aren't in released versions of gstreamer or farsight. That said, from 4 years ago, many more of these things are much better supported on Linux than they used to be. There is apparently a summer of code project out there to create codecs for MSN's video chat requirements, so if that shows up on the scene, it certainly makes Pidgin's job easier.
There's also the issue of how this gstreamer and farsight work will port to Windows, and I don't think we're quite sure yet.
It's not that we don't think this is a good idea, it's just that we don't want it half-assed so we want people who actually care about using the feature to be the ones helping to design it.
Wrong attitude ... about engineering (Score:5, Interesting)
QuantumG, some of the things you say are reasonable, but sometimes you just lose the thread entirely and enter pure la la land. This is one such case.
Bad programming or bad design are sometimes excusable, for example when the developer has inadequate technical background or experience, but they are never defensible under any circumstances, regardless of whether the software is being produced for a multi-million dollar product or for a small non-commercial community project.
Excusing poor practice is reasonable because it can be remedied through dedication and experience, and both the project and the developer benefit in the process, as do the end users.
But defending poor practice is never reasonable, because it doesn't help the developer to learn to do better, it results in friction within its own community (since other developers and the more clued up users know that things could be better), and it obviously doesn't help end users at all.
What's more, your "if you want it done differently, then do it" advice is at best a recipe for forking, which is never a good idea unless the current project leadership is completely beyond the pale, and at worst it's nothing more than a brush-off. It achieves nothing at all, beyond giving the bad developer a get-home-free card.
Making your personal project into a FOSS one doesn't come burdened with many responsibilities, but it does carry one: to act reasonably on behalf of your users, and that includes acting upon their suggestions --- yes, even some of the whiny ones because where there is smoke there is also usually fire. Putting yourself beyond criticism and beyond appeal for change is not a responsible attitude, and defending the unresponsive developer and/or his bad practice is itself the height of irresponsibility to the users of a project.
Whether the software is offered for free or not is completely immaterial to the above. Poor software is poor software, regardless of cost, and is indefensible.
Since you've defended your position on "the right of crap developers to be crap because they're not paid" over several iterations, I don't expect you to see the light now. But I'm afraid you're dead wrong, and just showing yourself to lack good judgement.
Re:Open Wengo has always worked for me... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Meebo (Score:1, Interesting)
Second Meebo. I discovered the camera feature by accident on a big iMac at work, low and behold, there I was. Anyone with a web browser will be able to jump in, using their aim/icq/whatever account as the conduit for meebo to piggyback on, or just use pure meebo, which has it's own chat network.