Update: I’ve released GUPnP-IGD 0.2.1 that works around these problems.

You are all cordially invited to my talk: Improving the quality of video calls on the Free Desktop. I will try to explain why Skype’s video calls look so much better than ours and what I’ve been doing to fix it, and how there is much more to do.

Now that WebRTC and RTCWeb are coming, it is more critical than ever that we can have good quality video calls in the GNOME platform so we can stay relevant.

I’d also like to thank my employer, Collabora, for once again sponsoring my trip. And don’t forget the Collabora party on Tuesday night!

As a side note, my colleague Sjoerd (who now has a  blog!) has made VP8 work with RTP. The Googlers are working hard to make some kind of standard. So hopefully, with Google’s clout, we’ll be able to have calls between a fully free platform and a hardware phone!

But its not only the country that is nice, it is also an awesome conference, the organizers are really doing a great job. The venue is nice, the speakers are really well treated, etc. But more importantly, the level of the conference is also quite impressive. It is a great place to meet lots of good developers that we rarely meet in the “western” conferences. Free Software is really alive in India and it is great to meet the people here. After my Farsight 2 talk (slides), there were some really good questions, from people who had actually tried to use it. It’s the fourth (and last) time that I give this talk in front of different audiences, and I really got the best questions and the best interaction. The organizers wanted to make it into a truly developer oriented conference and they’ve really succeeded.

For the last two months, I’ve been working on a complete redesign of Farsight, in an effort we call Farsight 2. The new generation RTP plugin is based on the excellent RTP implementation by Collabora’s own Wim Taymans. With it, we gain some exciting new features, most prominently A/V synchronization and multi-party conferencing. Also, the first generation wasn’t designed with video in mind and it wasn’t nice, but this time we’re trying to make it right. It’s now a GStreamer element that implements an interface, so it can easily be used in GStreamer based applications to give some of the integrated features Telepathy is designed for. I’m also trying to have nice unit tests, so we can try not to have the same kind of regressions we keep on fighting with Farsight 1. We also want to keep the API as simple as possible and well documented.

This week, I’ve finally reached an important milestone.. it works! So I had to make a screencast (sorry for cutting it a bit short at the end and no, its not slow, its the screencast thats 10fps):

For those who want to try, you need the CVS HEAD of gst-plugins bad, and for the demo gui, a patch to gst-python. Then you can try my git tree. It’s all very new, so if it breaks, you keep the pieces. I’d also like to thank Philippe Khalaf and Youness Alaoui who worked a lot on the design and all the people who wrote the code that was carried over from previous versions of Farsight.

Update: Oops, the git repository was not fetchable by http, its now fixed… Updated again: now we have a gitview and git server, so I’ll let the link point there instead

Nokia also released a Developer Preview of the new RTCOM software which includes the latest version of Farsight. So you can now do calls to SIP services on your Nokia N800. We hope many people try it and find the interoperability problems before the next release. Many SIP implementations are at best barely standard and we’ve end up finding subtle problems with many services with tested.

See you all next year in Istanbul!!

I’ve kept myself busy doing stuff on Farsight. For those who aren’t familiar with it, Farsight is a gstreamer based system to do voip and videoconferencing. Its currently used in the Nokia 770 and N800 internet tablets.