Since some time the good people at NlNet have been sponsoring Collabora to add multi-party audio/video calling to XMPP and do an implementation of this in Telepathy. This project is otherwise known as Muji.

This work has resulted in:

• an experimental XMPP extension called Muji
• a new and more modern telepathy API for doing calls (currently still in draft), which allows multi-party calls as well as adding the possibility to support call forking (ringing multiple remote devices, call goes to the one that's picked up first).
• An implementation of both of these in telepathy-gabble
• A small telepathy client for testing and demo purposes.

To proof it actually works, a nice screenshot of the demo client in a 4-way call:

The screenshot is featuring myself in Collabora's UK office (top-left), Robert McQueen from a hotelroom in Taipei (top-right), Will Thompson and Magical trevor also from the Collabora UK office (bottom-left) and Mike Ruprecht from somewhere in Missouri. So we were quite spread out over our little planet. Both audio and video quality was quite good, even though the network in robs hotel was a bit flaky from time to time.

In case you want to try it out have a look at the MujiDemoClient page.

Yesterday Google announced the WebM Project, giving the world a new open and royalty-free video codec called VP8. Thanks to Collabora Multimedia and Entropy Wave support for it landed in gstreamer git shortly after the announcement.

In Telepathy we quite like video conferencing, so as a logical next step i quickly put together some proof of concept RTP payloading elements for Gstreamer with the obvious result:

The screenshot isn't very exciting, which is exactly how it should be. In the world i would like to live in people don't have to care about video codecs, whether it is for video calls, playing online media or whatever else they want to do with video. Looking at the list of supporters for the WebM project this may actually happen and that in my opinion is much is actually the most important aspect of it all.

The most important aspect that is missing at this point to bring VP8 as the video calling codec to the world is the lack of a standard RTP specification. Which is something we will hopefully start working on with various other parties in the WebM project reasonably soon. For now if you want to feel cutting edge get Empathy from git master and my rtp elements. To give things a first try

After various people have nagged me for ages in one way or another , i've finally setup my blog

Based on ikiwiki with some bits and pieces of setup stolen from smcv.

Hopefully some actually interesting stuff will appear here at some point...