gadgets and technology devices: Libjingle: Now Audio and Video chat on GTalk via Pidgin

Libjingle: Now Audio and Video chat on GTalk via Pidgin

Pidgin is a popular open source multi-protocol IM Client. Leaving out the technical talk, pidgin is a all in one software which lets you connect to multiple Instant Messaging protocols like yahoo, msn, gtalk, facebook chat and more (see the complete list at pidgin.im).

Besides this, it has lots of other nifty features like checking if someone has blocked you on gtalk, support for lots of languages, doodle for yahoo messenger, poke for facebook. There are various plugins for encryption, notification, now playing, notifications, psychic mode. See complete list on the wiki.

For a long time pidgin has been criticized for lack of audio/video chat facilities on the supported protocols. A first step showing improvement in this area is support for audio/video chat in xmpp protocol, the underlying protocol for gtalk. With release 2.6.0, it is possible to have audio/video chat on GTalk using pidgin. This feature is not supported on Windows as of release 2.6.1 but is expected to be available soon.

Let’s have a look at how has this been made possible. The code used to enable audio/video chat has been a google code project called libjingle. Libjingle allows developers to build the following:-

A multi-user voice chat application
A multi-user video conferencing application
A multi-user live music streaming application
A peer-to-peer file sharing application

Here’s the quote changelog which announces audio/video support in GTalk using libjingle

Voice & Video support with Jingle (XEP-0166, 0167, 0176, & 0177), voice support with GTalk and voice and video support with the GMail web client. (Mike “Maiku” Ruprecht)

Here’s a screenshot of audio chat