The PR1.2 update of the N900 firmware is now officially released. The big new feature is video calls. It is also the world’s first phone to offer Skype video calls as well as Google Talk compatible video calls! And all of this uses Farsight2, the GStreamer based voice and video calling library. The whole Farsight2 team is very proud to have been able to participate in this world first. And just like all other calls on Maemo, video calls use the Telepathy framework. We obviously also support Jingle (aka Jabber aka XMPP) and SIP just like the N800 and N810. But we also add H.264 support.
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!
I don’t have an N900 yet but I am wondering…is there a front-facing camera? It looks like there is in the images of the N900 but I didn’t see it mentioned in the tech specs?
@Nathan: no, you have to use a mirror
@Nathan Nutter Yes, it has a 0.3 Mpx (it one of the easter eggs of N900, another one it the FM radio). The quality on my N900 with PR1.1 is much worse than it is shown here. I hope PR1.2 improve the quality to this level 🙂
@Juanjo: The quality is still pretty bad, better than PR1.1, but worse than this.
Now that’s some cool news! Were there any problems with the PR1.2 update that one should be careful about?
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Sorry for stealing thunder, but Fring supported video Skype calls on Symbian & iPhone (one way) for a while now.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/24/fring-adds-skype-video-support-on-s60-threatens-to-make-front-c/
OK, nice ! But how long does your N900 lives on its battery when you’re online on GTalk and Skype at the same time ?
Hint: mine has to meet the charger right at the beginning of the afternoon, after being charged all night.
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Lucky you 🙂
If we could just get this on the desktop, where skype just sucks 🙁
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Hmh, that’s nice, except free desktop clients don’t really support h264 (at least empathy doesn’t, since there is no gstreamer backend). It’d be nice to have had it support theora at least.
@Corsac: Actually, Empathy works fine with H.264. You just need to install gst-ffmpeg and the x264enc plugin (from gst-plugins-ugly). Sadly, no free distribution can distribute those in the US (or other countries where software patents exist).
That said, Theora is not the solution, it is not a great codec for streaming. I have great hopes that VP8 will be better and will be supported by various hardware DSPs. That said, none of these codecs are currently pre-installed on Maemo.
Hello I have an N900 I´ve just update to 1.2 firmware, but de video calls using skype it doesnt work. I can see my camara but I´cant not see the other part. Help Pls!!
Bonjour j’ai un N900 que je viens de mettre à jour à 1,2 firmware, mais la vidéo de Skype en mode appel ne marche pas. Je peux voir ma camara mais personne ne me vois, et ça ne passe pas dans l’autre sens aussi…une astuce ????
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@nicolas: @philippe: Open bugs on bugs.maemo.org if it fails