I’ve been away from the office for a couple of days, but when I got back to Cambridge, Daf and Sjoerd had some pretty cool stuff to show me:

These screenshots are taken by using an environment variable to tell stream-engine just to create an xvimagesink for any call, but Daf’s writing a simple pygtk UI which handles embedding the output window into the UI properly and should make placing/receiving calls slightly less mystical. Even so, a graphical video call APP in ~150 lines of python… not too bad if you ask me. 🙂

We got an OLPC prototype at Collabora last week, and have been playing with the Telepathy VOIP/IM framework on the devices. Using telepathy-gabble’s (our XMPP backend) Jingle implementation, and telepathy-stream-engine with the Farsight GStreamer RTP library, we got a bidirectional voice/video call going pretty quickly using a few lines of python and a bit of hackery (patches to follow :D).

We’re going to polish this up into an activity you can install, and also Sjoerd Simons has been working with us on telepathy-salut, an XMPP Link-Local (also known as Rendezvous, Bonjour, iChat, whatever) backend which we’re hoping to also get working as part of the OLPC platform.