GAIM with voice? Could it really be true?

This just landed in the gaim-devel mailinglist. It’s from Sean Egan, one of the main GAIM developers:


People,

I just thought I’d give you an update with what I’m doing here at Google and how it ties into the 2.0.0 plans.

gaim-vv has concentrated on mostly one thing: viewing other people’s webcams. It has nothing about audio and very little about sending media. The work I’m doing with Google is about full-duplex audio conversations, which, clearly, is not covered by gaim-vv as it stands.

I’m adding APIs to media.c to handle full-duplex audio connections, and its corresponding GUI.

GStreamer and farsight currently aren’t mature enough to be usable within our timeframe for 2.0.0, so right I’m using code from Linphone instead. It should be possible to migrate to GStreamer later, when that becomes the better choice.

I’m aiming to get this code—the API and GUI—into CVS this week, before the beta. This will make sure all the new strings are in for translators and will pick out any problems with building.

The actual implementation in the Jabber prpl won’t be ready in time for the Beta (unless it gets delayed a bit longer), but it should be ready for the planned Thanksgivingish freeze, which fits into our plans. The code I’ll be adding has already been tested really, really well, and adds no new strings at all, so I think it should be fine if it’s not ready in time for this first freeze.

Sound cool?
I seem to recall that they did have plans for backporting gaim-vv to GAIM proper before 2.0.0, but this thread seems to nullify those (or at least put them on hold until sometime next year). However, the gaim-vv website says that no further gaim-vv releases will be made, as they’re busy merging with GAIM. In any case, real voice capabilities in GAIM soon sounds awesome!