KDE voice/video communication abstraction?

[George Kiagiadakis]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Emmanuel Lepage
<emmanuel.lepage at savoirfairelinux.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Thanks for replying. In SFLPhone, all media is done on the server side, so the client side is a light as it can possibly be. This allow us to have very good portability for embedded devices. To display video, the daemon simply share a framebuffer using POSIX shared memory. The implementation is only ~60 line long and work. It is not perfect yet, but it does work. We had the same discussions and problems you had, and it is the solution we took. Because:
> -We avoid client side logic when unnecessary
> -It is actually simple and portable
> -It is not dependent on X11, it is a simple ARGB array with the buffer size and resolution pushed over dbus
>
> The downside are:
> -You have to be in sync or it will fall apart
> -It bypass dbus, something we would have liked to avoid too

I see, thanks for the explanation. Actually Telepathy/Farstream also
recently gained support for sharing video buffers using shared memory
and letting the CM do the streaming. It is not generally a recommended
design, but we need it to support some proprietary protocol
implementations. So, you may actually be able to use that and provide
video as well.

> As for the CM, if we implement that http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/spec/Connection_Manager.html, http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/spec/Protocol.html and http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/spec/Channel.html as an alternative DBUS interface for the SFLPhone daemon, it should work (but not the video) as a telepathy protocol without any other modifications?

Yes, if you implement the required Telepathy dbus interfaces, it will
work as a telepathy connection manager without modifying any UI.

> For the protocols, contacts need to be mirrored on the service side? So we would need a gnome+evolution and KDE+Akonadi implementation.

I'm not sure what you mean. There are protocols that provide their
contacts from the server (see xmpp, msn, etc...) and protocols that
don't (see sip). For protocols that don't provide contacts, the
contact list just doesn't display anything. There is a plan since a
long time to integrate telepathy contacts with Nepomuk & Akonadi and
be able to have metacontacts and also support calling phone numbers
from the address book, but nobody has finished this work yet (and I'm
not sure at what state it is atm).

Regards,
George