Critical Exponent

I am now Webcam-enabled! Give me a call! You need to use software that complies with the SIP or H.323 protocols. AFAIK at the moment, here’s how:

SIP: I have an SIP address registered at ekiga.net. (You should get one too, BTW!) Give me a heads-up and then point your videoconferencing software my way:

• On Linux, use Ekiga
• On Windows, get an SIP client, such as the free 3CX VOIP (not an endorsement; I haven’t tried them)

H.323: This is the protocol that Windows NetMeeting uses. Go to Start > Run… and type conf. If I know your username and hostname/IP, I can initiate a call. You can probably do the same if you have that information on me.

IM: Gaim does not yet seem to support video chat, and Ekiga does not seem to support the usual IM protocols (I think). I’ve read that Windows Messenger (but not MSN Messenger nor Windows Live Messenger) supports these protocols. Let us hope Microsoft will start/continue being SIP/H.323 compliant, and that the open source packages will learn to work with IM protocols.

One caveat is that I’ve only tried this within my intranet— so it may take some fiddling the first time to make sure it works fine across my router/firewall.

Here’s a list of programs that work with Ekiga.

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Technical Details

I bought a Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks Pro

I downloaded the UVC driver using

svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk

and installed it using

# gmake clean
# gmake
# gmake install

On my desktop (but not on my laptop) I ran into an Anaconda installer problem: the wrong architecture is set up for compiling header modules. The fix is here.

I ran ekiga, and it just worked (after configuration the input and output audio devices)

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 26th, 2006 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Programming & configuration, Sony VAIO VGN S580. 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.