would like to help with video and voice

[Stephen Holt]

Hey John,
How data is sent between clients is protocol dependent, but you're right in
guessing that libpurple is using gstreamer to handle the media streams (and
farsight to handle the transport protocols).

I'm just delving into this stuff myself, but gstreamer is structured
similarly to QuickTime in that it uses a push/pull model of displaying and
encoding video.  Practically, this means that after gstreamer decodes the
frames of a stream, they're pushed as pixel data into a window.

In the current state of things, gstreamer includes working OS X targeted
sources (inputs) and sinks (outputs) for audio, and a working sink for
video.  A source for video is included in the plugins-bad distribution, but
it uses the older Sequence Grabber API (
http://developer.apple.com/quicktime/qttutorial/seqgrab.html), which is not
available to 64bit apps; this will need to be replaced with a source based
on the newer QTKit QTCapture* objects.

We could, theoretically, write a gstreamer plugin allowing us to use
quicktime to handle the encoding and decoding parts of the pipeline.  But
this isn't vital to the feature working.

All Adium itself should need to care about is the UI code and some glue to
libpurple.

If that sounds like a bit of an unorganized braindump, that's likely because
it is. Feel free to ask any questions, and any help you want to offer is
always appreciated.

--
Steve

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:04 PM, John Carlson
<john.carlson3 at sbcglobal.net>wrote:

> I'd like to help with video and voice in my spare time, what little of it I
> have.  A couple of questions....Does libpurple send video an image at a
> time, or is it a stream of video?  What about audio?
>
> My guess is, if gstreamer is being used, that it's sent as a stream, but it
> looks like it's being displayed an image at a time (or perhaps I'm looking
> at old code?).
>
> Can we leverage quicktime for any of this?  The first quicktime stuff I
> looked at works with files/urls, but perhaps it's extensible enough to
> handle streams or images?
>
>
> John
>
>
>
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