MSN audio/video chat in Telepathy

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Par Guillaume Desmottes le lundi, septembre 14 2009, 22:34 - Nerdzage - Lien permanent

Lots of you were waiting for it, it's finally there: you can now make MSN compatible audio/video calls using Empathy! Louis-Francis released telepathy-butterfly 0.5.1 today, bringing this long awaited feature to our users.

In order to use it you'll need:

telepathy-butterfly 0.5.1
papyon 0.4.2
A recent version of Farsight 2 (at least 0.0.13)
A recent version of Empathy; I strongly advise you to use 2.27.92. Note that this version has a video bug when used with a recent GTK+ (see Danielle's post for details). This bug has been fixed in master and the fix will be in 2.28.0.

Packages should reach Debian and our Ubuntu Telepathy PPA pretty soon.

Lot of people deserve credits for this big achievement which involve a lot of work in different Collabora projects:

Philippe Kalaf, Olivier Crête, Youness Alaoui and Richard Spiers for the Farsight 2 plugins.
Youness, Ole Andre and Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne for the reverse engineering of the MSN protocols and its implementation in Papyon.
Youness (him again!) for the NAT traversal code in libnice.
Louis-Francis and Jonny Lamb for the Telepathy layer in Butterfly.
The Empathy team and especially Jonathan Tellier who polished the audio/video GUI

Let's not forget the amsn project which was used as a base of the protocol work.

Bigon and me testing Empathy interop with the official MSN client.

So what next? As audio/video video wasn't enough to keep Louis-Francis busy during his summer internship at Collabora, he also implemented file transfer support in Butterfly! His branch should hopefully be merged soon and so Empathy will gain MSN FT support! Olivier Le Thanh Duong on his side just finished implementing offline messages support. As you can see Butterfly development is more active than ever!

Commentaires

1. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 00:23 par Mats Taraldsvik

Brilliant! When FT support is done, I'm moving to Empathy. Thanks a lot! :)

2. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 02:15 par UbuntuWay

Great news! Excellent work, ppl! :D

3. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 04:56 par K

A Quantum Leap for the Linux world.

4. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 08:41 par Cool

Awesome, congrats! How is the support for blocking unwanted contacts going? I remember I couldn't use that in previous versions.

5. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 08:49 par nelson

I also need the block/unblock user feature in order to switch over to empathy,, but it's looking very promising.. thanks

6. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 09:44 par Stéphane

Great job ! Congrats !

7. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 10:09 par Xav

Great great great. Will apt-get update compulsively until it's there :)

8. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 12:31 par Martin

Nice work, keep it up - makes Linux awesome!

P.S. Something seems to have went wrong with your trackback-system, could you please delete the duplicates? thanks

9. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 15:11 par Luis Medinas

Thanks a lot for your work, GNOME really deserves a better im client with MSN.

10. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 16:23 par FunkyM

Awesome work! If as good as advertised I am clearly switching to empathy and happy to contribute, too. Thumbs up!

11. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 16:35 par Max

Great job technically..

But why working on MSN ? Why contributing to increasing the MSN sharemarket ? I don't understand why some developers prefer to spend time on reverse engineering this protocol instead of inventing something better ? That their choice ok... But isn't it counterproductive for the Libre ?

12. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 17:38 par Mattias

Max: because MSN already has such a large market share. Of my friends, something like 80-85% use MSN, 10% ICQ and, i think, only three guys actually have a GTalk/Jabber account.

13. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 17:57 par Alberto Ruiz

Okay, you just gave me the one reason to make it worth switching to Empathy!!! :D

14. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 18:25 par Gabriel Falcão

That is just AWESOME! Finally I'll be able to get rid of clonky and buggy amsn :) No more Tk! Thank you guys!

15. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 19:46 par mike

What's with all the WhiteSpace in the video-window?

Why not using common Picture-In-Picture (like Skype for example), and make it big.

16. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 20:38 par Bart

I agree with the remark on the video window.. It looks clunky, hopefully it will get a facelift soon? ;)

17. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 21:02 par bob

This is wonderful. I love you all.

BTW: I noticed that nobody have been working on skype. Is this due to legal constraints or is it just lack of time?

18. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 23:52 par Nick

Fantastic work, looks really great. One question - is this going into Ubuntu 9.10?

I'd love to see it but I suppose Karmic+1 will be fine too I guess *sigh* :-P

19. Le mercredi, septembre 16 2009, 00:45 par Guillaume

Thanks everyone for your nice words :)

@Cool: don't think anyone is working on it atm. Feel free to open a bug about that on bugs.freedesktop.org if there is none yet.

@Martin: done

@FunkyM: We are waiting for your contributions. :)

@Max: open protocols have always been and stay our priority; Empathy suports audio/video with XMPP and SIP since a while. But by implementing this kind of feature, you can convince people to switch to free software and start to use open protocols. Some people can't stop to use MSN directly; mostly for social reasons.

@Bob: mostly because the Skype protocol hasn't be completely reverse engineered and nobody is working on it atm. :)

@Nick: I don't know. I discussed this a bit with Ubuntu people and they weren't sure. Any way, package should reach the PPA soon.

20. Le mercredi, septembre 16 2009, 06:51 par Tommy Brunn

Great news! Like one of the commentators above, once we get true MSN file transfers and proper IRC support, I'm ditching Pidgin for Empathy.

There's just something about how Empathy looks a little cluttered. I think it might be because of the fugly status icons.

21. Le mercredi, septembre 16 2009, 10:10 par Cool

@Guillaume:

I searched for it instead of filing a new bug. This one looks relevant:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug...

And kind of mixes with this:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug...

Personally I regularly get unwanted messages from people not on my contact list and for that reason I still use other IM clients. Quite annoying spam.

Looks like it's also a regression for Ubuntu users who need to start pidgin to block contacts, despite Empathy being the default. There's a ruckus about that in the forums of karmic:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread....

22. Le mercredi, septembre 16 2009, 10:20 par Cool

Forgot to add: I also have to temporarily block some individuals on my contact list if I want to avoid some drama queen moments. ;)

It's a feature that is expected in most IM clients, so I understand why there are some annoyed users in the Ubuntu forums.

Hope it can be easily added.

23. Le vendredi, septembre 25 2009, 14:14 par karpouz

it's time for lunch !

La discussion continue ailleurs

1. Le mardi, septembre 15 2009, 11:53 par Linux|Lounge.net

Telepathy-Framework überrascht durch MSN A/V-Konferenzen

Mit dem kommenden GNOME-Release, 2.28, wird der ehemalige Standard-Messenger Pidgin, der übrigens nie zum GNOME Desktop gehörte, in den meisten Distributionen vollständig durch das hauseigene Telepathy-Framework samt Frontend Empathy ersetzt. Doch...

2. Le dimanche, septembre 20 2009, 12:56 par Linux|Lounge.net

Telepathy-Framework überrascht durch MSN A/V-Konferenzen

3. Le dimanche, septembre 20 2009, 12:57 par Linux|Lounge.net