Dafydd ([info]dgh) wrote,
@ 2009-02-25 09:46:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend  Next Entry
Entry tags:collabora, fosdem, jingle, tandberg

Jingle interoperability day

Before FOSDEM this year, a bunch of people got together to test our various Jingle implementations with each other. Attendance was great: I think we had representatives from most implementations, and we almost ran out of chairs.


Paul Witty from Tandberg and Sjoerd from Collabora, testing Jingle calls to a Tandberg video conferencing endpoint.

I'd judge the event a great success: we found a number of bugs and even fixed some of them the same day. In particular for Collabora, we got to try out our new support for raw UDP transports and the latest ICE signalling. There was also good discussion about future directions for file transfer and relaying support in Jingle, as well as XTLS and its relationship to Jingle. Plus, the testing done on the day itself was continued afterwards, notably including working interoperability between our ICE library, libnice, with Paul's implementation.


(8 comments) - (Post a new comment)


[info]jbailey
2009-02-25 02:40 pm UTC (link)
Ah, awesome!

Was my employer there? I'm curious how well we play along with that community. The Android folks are getting better for their kernel stuff, which is cool.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]dgh
2009-02-25 07:50 pm UTC (link)
Nope, no Googlers. :)

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]robot101.net
2009-02-25 08:08 pm UTC (link)
The only contact we've had (certainly Collabora and the Telepathy community, and I believe the XMPP community in general) with people working on XMPP at Google has been with Justin Uberti (http://juberti.blogspot.com/). He's been very helpful when we've spoken to him, and chips in sensibly on the XMPP mailing lists about Jingle. We've not come across anyone else from Google working with XMPP, and there wasn't any Google presence at the XMPP events at FOSDEM because Justin was on vacation. The general impression from him seems to be that Jingle is good enough now and the Google Talk / Video stuff will move to it Really Soon Now (tm). However, with the current non-standard video chat signalling (which we've reverse engineered), and even though the Video Chat plugin claims to do H.264/AVC now, we've not been able to convince it to decode an stream from x264 or ffmpeg, so we're still stuck at interoperating on the RTP level there for some reason.

The documentation on code.google.com (http://code.google.com/apis/talk/jep_extensions/extensions.html) seems to lag behind quite badly - the audio/video call extensions never made it on there, and things like how your ad-hoc multi-user chats work are still a mystery to us. On a related note, we were pretty upset (http://davyd.livejournal.com/269541.html) to see that Latitude seems to be nothing to do with XMPP given you have a deployed platform for it, and we have working standards for geolocation over XMPP which we just implemented support for in Telepathy. Epic interoperability fail. :'(

HTH. Feel free to mail/IM (robert.mcqueen@collabora.co.uk) or ping me on IRC if you'd like any more details.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]jbailey
2009-02-26 03:28 pm UTC (link)
I'd offer that the Latitude people probably aren't even aware that XMPP exists. The problem with a company this size is that it's really hard to get information about what's happening and who might have relevant information. Usually a design document will get sent somewhere for public review, but the right person has to be looking at the mailing list, and some design docs never go through that step if they're particularly strategic.

The project that I'm on right now is interesting because every time we turn around, we discover another group that has a side project to do the exact same thing. At that point we can to reconcile one more time our designs with their experiences, etc.

I think that XMPP is under-appreciated in the world in general. To me, the idea of having an authenticated communications channel into a person's machine or handheld is the right answer for just about everything, especially since it's spam-resistant and could be network secure and end-to-end secure. In practice, I don't think I've come across any app that wants me to do anything other than chat. I think beyond some amount of deployment, it's just not likely to occur to people that you could.

One thing that might help is that Appengine has announced that there will be XMPP support in an upcoming version. I can hope that the interface will be enough to do something cool.

Tks,
Jeff Bailey

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]dgh
2009-02-26 08:15 pm UTC (link)
I think you're right about XMPP being under-appreciated, but it's still a maturing technology. Some of the most interesting bits like PEP and Jingle have only emerged recently and are still being refined. Perhaps once they're more widely implemented and deployed we'll start to see things taking advantage of them.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]jbailey
2009-02-25 02:40 pm UTC (link)
Hey, I wasn't paying attention, apparently. Tandberg supports Jingle?

(Reply to this)

Which actually work?
(Anonymous)
2009-02-26 12:40 am UTC (link)
I would love to find a client that actually works with Jingle video.
I've looked at just about everything on the clients list for Jingle and none of them actually claim to support video chat using Jingle. Some of them have some evidence that they are working on supporting that, but I have yet to find one that actually works.

I'm building a project on Skype right now, but it is quite restrictive in what you can do. Would love to use something open like Jingle, but so far I haven't found any clients to play around with and test how it performs versus skype. Any suggestions?

(Reply to this) (Thread)
Re: Which actually work?
(Anonymous)
2009-02-26 07:15 pm UTC (link)
Telepathy has been supporting video calls over XMPP for quite a while, which has been shipped on Nokia N800/N810 webtables and is usable on the desktop using Empathy. The current releases use older dialects of Jingle though. In the interop event we tested an experimental branch which implements the current version of the XEP(s). We're quite hopefull to have this merged and released soon.

During the interop day we had some success when testing audio/video with the Tandberg implementation (as mentioned in the post) and iirc audio with the Psi and Yate implementations

One area where jingle isn't so strong is when there is a failure to punch NAT's using ICE, currently the plan is to use TURN relays (which is actually part of the ICE stack), but the number of those that have been rolled out and are usable is quite small currently.

I think jingle will mature quite fast and we'll see a lot of clients coming out with support for it this year. Basically whether jingle is suitable _now_ depends on what you're trying to archieve in your project, personally i think it should be good enough for most things. I'd be happy to discuss things in more detail, if you could provide more information about your project.

Feel free to mail/IM me (sjoerd.simons@collabora.co.uk) or ping me on IRC (sjoerd on freenode) with more question.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

(8 comments) - (Post a new comment)

Create an Account
Forgot your login or password?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…