Video chat support to Google Talk on GNU/Linux - coming shortly

[Praveen A]

Google recently added video calling to their online Google mail
service, will Empathy be able to interact with this video calling
service?

With their new service google decided to not use the XMPPs Jingle
extension for voice/video, but instead extend their own protocol, the
protocol which they also used in Google Talk client. Luckily we
already supported the older version of that protocol and with some
small adjustments in telepathy-gabble (our XMPP backend) we were able
to support the new version. Some users reported issues when trying to
use it with Empathy though, which is something that's quite high on my
todo list to get fixed.

Unfortunately Google decided to use H264-SVC as a video codec,for
which there are currently no open source implementations available. So
for now we're only able to support audio calls. Luckily Google seems
to be planning an update with support for more conventional codecs
like H264-AVC. Once that happens we should be able to support video
calls without many problems.

The biggest problem of video calling on linux at the moment is that,
apart from Theora and Dirac, all modern video codecs are heavily
patented. So no distribution can ship encoders for those. It remains
to be seen whether Google will introduce support for Theora, if not
then users are still required to get the necessary codecs themselves
to make things work :(

Checkout the complete interview with Empathy Messenger developer Sjoerd Simons

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