Audio/Video Conferencing using OSCAR for Telepathy
The telepathy project needs to support the major protocols in use in todays IM world. Oscar is one of them, and supports audio/video conferencing between AIM (windows) clients and iChat (os x) clients.
Adding support for this protocol means that telepathy users will be able to do audio/video conference with Apple and Microsoft users in a seamless way! And as more project switch to telepathy, they will benefit from the audio/video capabilities. This leaves the doors open to a whole bunch of new applications and ideas.
Deliverables
- IM OSCAR connection manager (login, buddy list, messages).
- audio/video conferencing negotiation support (and let farsight handle the conference)
Schedule
- May : Get familiar with Telepathy
- June : Basic implementation of the OSCAR protocol in telepathy based on existing works/documentations (I'll be in exams from june 6h till june 26th)
- Implementation of the FLAP protocol layer used by OSCAR (+ SNAC and TLV packets support)
- July : Extend the implementation/documentation to support as many features as time allows (with priority on audio/video conferencing)
- Support for login/authentification
- Support for protocol negotiation
- Support for the buddy list
- Support for the ICBM service (messages thru server)
- Add more support if time allows it
- August : Finish the code and tests with farsight (+ possibly writing some code for farsight to support the conference)
- Support for video/audio presence
- Support for video/audio conference initiation
- September : Release
Current state (08-20)
What is "working" (sometimes still buggy) :
- 0.13.2 telpathy specs
- Login / Logout
- Buddy list : add,remove buddies
- Presence update : away,online,offline
- Direct Messaging
- Self presence : online, away, invisible
What is in the process :
- Audio negotiation :
- It is possible to start a call from iChat/AIM but the iChat/AIM side is not sending sound yet. Needs some more work in the RTP library and to be able to initiate the call.
- Video negotiation :
- Presence of video is given to iChat/AIM, start of a call not done yet but pretty much the same than the audio parts.
How is it done ?
- The Telepathy part is done using Java with joscar and the java dbus bindings. ( I produced some patches for the bindings and for cohoba, the gnome telepathy client )