State of the Voice/Video (was Re: Could I help with bug #6)

[Evan Schoenberg, M.D.]

Nathan,

I'm cc'ing the Adium development list, as I'd like to get everyone up  
to speed with where we stand.

On Aug 17, 2009, at 12:56 PM, Nathan Schiffer wrote:

> According to Catfish_Man, you're currently working on the UI for  
> pidgin's av stuff. Since you're understandably busy with your job, I  
> wondered if an additional developer would accelerate the process.  
> Let me know if you're interested, and what the progress is toward  
> this (imho) important feature.

We would love your help :)

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if I'm the only one working on  
it, it might never happen; I so miss the days of college when I could  
just hole up for a weekend and code to my heart's content.  Try that  
now, I'd lose my 80-hour-per-week job (well, maybe that'd be nice, but  
it's probably not a good long-term move), my wife would be less than  
amused on multiple levels, and it would generally just end in tears.

The current State of the AV is that we've got successful compilation  
of libpurple with vv enabled.  Its dependencies are all compiled, of  
course, with the likely exception of one or more gstreamer plugins  
which will turn out to be necessary.  Gstreamer plugins provide  
access, among other things, to specific protocols and audio/video  
formats, so while we have all the ones that look necessary, and they  
should be loading, I suspect we'll find something missing once we get  
to that point.

The next step necessary is to hook into the libpurple media API and  
see if we can get successful debug logging of establishing connections  
and receiving voice/video data through it. To that end, I copied the  
Pidgin implementation file to adiumPurpleMedia.m in adium/Plugins/ 
Purple Service.  I did little with it so far other than a glorified s/ 
pidgin/adium/.  It certainly doesn't compile... all its 'gtk' bits  
need to be replaced with calls to the Adium core which in turn will  
interact with our own video UI, which doesn't exist at all in current  
Adium source.  For starters, just having our hooks into libpurple in  
the right places and having logging which verifies things are going in  
the right direction would be great.

There were some previous efforts toward sending and receiving video,  
over a year ago now... I don't know that status or location of that  
old code, which wouldn't be usable directly but could likely be  
helpful in various ways. Does anyone out there have details they could  
share?

Cheers,
Evan
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