I was recently attempting to set up a video conference between me and a friend. Of course, the biggest problem that came up was that I use Linux and she uses Windows. For standard instant messaging, this poses no problem. There are many excellent cross-platform clients, such as Gaim, that interoperate with a variety of networks. In addition, there are numerous clients for a single operating system that also interoperate. Adding voice and video to the equation presents an entirely new problem…

Perhaps the most common networks for these activities are Yahoo! and MSN. Yahoo! has an abysmal client for Linux that supports neither voice nor video. MSN has no Linux client at all. Clients such as Kopete and aMSN support the video aspect of one or more of these services, but don’t support voice. So much for that idea.

Next, we look at the wide array of SIP clients. While, in theory, different SIP clients are compatible with each other, this falls short due to lack of common support for the various video codecs. The most promising solutions on Linux, Ekiga and Linphone, are either difficult to install or crash-prone on Windows. Similarly, programs that work on Windows, such as WengoPhone, are crash-prone or buggy on Linux.

At this point, I’m down to walking my friend through installing Ekiga on Windows and hoping it works or simply running MSN Messenger in a VMWare instance (it doesn’t seem to want to work properly in Wine). Has anyone out there managed to connect the Linux and Windows worlds? Am I missing something, or is it just going to take time for the various clients to develop?

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 17th, 2006 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Linux, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.