Gaim Forks To Get Voice And Video Support

RAMMS+EIN writes "Everyone's favorite instant messenger, Gaim, has recently been forked. The new gaim-vv project aims to provide voice and video chat support, which will eventually be backported into the main branch." Nice to see an amicable fork; it sounds like this will mean competition for GnomeMeeting.

Re:Too many choices

[RAMMS+EIN]

Right, people don't want to be swamped with options, but they do want to have voice and video chat.

The comment about GnomeMeeting is quite inaccurate, as GnomeMeeting uses the H.323 protocol, which was used by Netmeeting and old versions of MSN Messenger, but is not used by any messengers these days. What gaim-vv aims to provide is voice and video chat with AIM/iChat, MSN, Yahoo, etc, that is, the protocols that people actually _use_.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[RAMMS+EIN]

``Is it compatible with Apple's iChat AV / AIM's video and audio chatting?''

That's the idea. However, an idea is all there is for now. AFAIK, all major IMs use proprietary protocols for voice and video that have not been reverse engineered yet.

Re:good thing

[LostCluster]

Of course, Linux has been able to do voice chat and video chat for a long time. I mean, there's speakfreely, rat, GnomeMeeting, ophone, etc, and you can serve streaming MPEGs or such, which is what I used to do.

Yes. However there's competiting formats for realtime video chat right now... and the so called "open standards" seem to be ignored. GAIM's point is to emulate the proprietary formats that haven't been released for Linux yet.

Re:GAIM UI

[RAMMS+EIN]

Use the preferences, dude.

I personally thing Gaim has one of the _nicest_ UIs around. I group all chats and conversations in one tabbed window, so that I never have to worry about things popping up again.

Want chats in a separate window? Click the checkbox. Want every conversation in a separate window, but all chats in one tabbed window? It can be done. Pretty much any imaginable combination is possible.

Re:I wish...

[ChipX86]

We won't have a 1.0 release. Our version number is just the previous number + 1, so a 1.0 just isn't going to happen :) Sorry. Remember though that a stable, full-featured program doesn't have to be labeled 1.0.

Re:another fork?

[RAMMS+EIN]

I may be wrong, but AFAIK ayttm is a everybuddy fork and everybuddy is not based on the Gaim codebase. They are very similar, though. Traditionally, eb has had the features and Gaim the stability. I wish they would cooperate more...

iChat uses H.263

[FreeHeel]

from Apple [apple.com]:

iChat AV uses the industry-standard H.263 video codec and advanced pre- and post-processing techniques to deliver picture-perfect video. It uses the sophisticated technologies built into QuickTime to compress the video and audio while maintaining rich detail, natural colors, and smooth video over any 100-Kbps or faster Internet connection. Specific technologies include:

• Spatial anisotropic diffusion to maintain edge detail and sharpness while reducing unnecessary digital "noise."
• Temporal noise reduction to average out noise between video frames while avoiding motion blurring.
• Post-filtering of the received video to avoid blockiness and ringing artifacts.

iChat AV uses a sophisticated digital audio codec to deliver the same crystal-clear audio quality that you expect when you use a typical landline telephone. The fullduplex technology built into iChat AV lets you have natural conversations, just as with the advanced speakerphones found in conference boardrooms. Most other solutions force users to talk one at a time, providing an experience more akin to talking on a CB radio.

Apple has recently announced support for H.264 [macworld.com], which is a good thing

Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[ZeekWatson]

Hopefully this fork will have a nicer dev team than plain Gaim. At the URL below you can see how the Gaim lead introduces himself to the Gentoo dev team by insulting Gentoo users and basically making an ass of himself. It goes something like:

As Gentoo users are generally an annoying nusiance in my IRC channel...

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35890 [gentoo.org]

Best that could be expected from an AOL employee I guess!

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[RAMMS+EIN]

Gaim evolves quickly. File transfers work both ways for at least AIM and IRC (I wrote the IRC support based on the AIM code), and I think the MSN and Yahoo plugins have been able to at least receive files for a long time now, so chances are they can also send files now.

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[lorien420]

Clearly you never spent any time in the #gaim irc channel. Before .60 went out of the door, Gentoo offered a gaim-cvs which had many many bugs. This is because they were using a cvs version of gaim. These people would use this and then go to #gaim to complain about it not working, often many times an hour. This created MASSIVE amounts of frustration, because the Gentoo users had absolutely no clue about anything involving gaim's cvs development of .60.

Gaim-vv

[Anonymous Coward]

Gaim-vv is really more of an offsite branch of Gaim than a fork.

From the sf project page:
A friendly fork of Gaim (http://gaim.sf.net) to concentrate on video and voice support, which will eventually be backported

Basicly, I wrote a patch based on some code from libyahoo2 for Gaim to allow viewing other people's webcams. Filamoon independently had done some on msn voice and video related stuff. We decided to start a separate sourceforge project so we could collaborate and stuff.

Eventually we hope to merge it into Gaim proper. Currently it's in a state where it may be useful to users, but not in a state where it can be merged into Gaim. It breaks the core/ui split for example. It uses threads for some things. There's not really any shared code between the Yahoo! and MSN related features yet.

There are no AIM, iChat, ICQ, Jabber, IRC, Gadu-Gadu, Napster, Zephyr, etc, video or voice features. Someone wishing to work on that should contact us and start coding.

I don't consider gaim-vv to be in competition with any other project, GnomeMeeting or otherwise.

i'm the one

[radoni]

supposed to be adding video transmit support for y! webcam. my computers (yes plural) recently had a meltdown of some kind. don't hold your breath.

those who are interested, i'm sure the help would be welcomed. scope is video and voice. contact marv (#gaim / freenode)

of note is the libj2k completely GNU GPL jpeg2000 library implementation, which avoids the questionably-incompatible licensing and free-as-in-freedom issues of libjasper.

there's a lot of msn/linphone work in there too.

for those of you have worked on patching Direct IM images to work again, gaim-vv would be the place to get that committed. hint, hint.

cheers.

Stable?

[prandal]

GAIM for Windows has been plagued with stability problems from 0.74 onwards, with the MSN protocol being unusable (unless you like GAIM crashing out when people message you). Fortunately, it seems to be fixed in the 0.77 release.

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[fdobbie]

MSN certainly cannot send or receive files at the moment, but people are working on it.

Re:Since I run Debian...

[ocelotbob]

debian stable is like that, but that's because it is designed to be just that, rock stable. Debian unstable or testing, however, are pretty current; unstable's got 2.6.5 and everything now.

Re:Since I run Debian...

[Blackknight]

Or you could switch to testing/unstable and run the latest stuff.

I run Sarge on my workstation at work and it is rock solid.

Re:another fork?

[camh]

The word fork is being a bit overused lately because some high profile projects have forked recently.
This is not a fork of gaim - since it is planned to merge the changes back into gaim, it is just a branch. Branches are quite common when you want to add substantial features to a program, because it isolates those new features from the mainline until it is ready, and development of minor features can continue on the mainline.
You can call it a fork if you want, but I think that is just sensationalising what is just a development branch.

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[Doug Neal]

Why did this get modded down?

I switched from Gaim to Kopete when KDE 3.2 was released. It fits in better with the rest of my KDE desktop and seems a bit more complete.. it's got all the protocol support gaim has. One particularly nice feature is meta-contacts. If you've got the same person under multiple protocols you can add them to the same meta-contact and they only show up in the list once.

Also supports MSN display pictures and file transfers (although they have a habit of aborting halfway through so no good for big files), and unlike gaim it not only notifies you when the other person closes the chat window, it notifies you when they open one too, before they've even typed anything... people can get very suprised when they open a window and I speak first :)

Re:I wish...

[ChipX86]

Non-conformist? Perhaps. How would you define a 1.0 release? How can we? Development on this program can never end, and what makes a 1.0 release is a matter of opinion only. If we did release a 1.0, we'd hear from so many people how it wasn't ready for one. There's no reason to. If people don't use gaim because of it, that's fine. We have plenty of people who do use it, but we're not in it for the popularity contest stuff. We're in it because we want a good IM client to use. Scratching an itch.