Hacker News Reader

Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Still dreaming of Apple opening up its FaceTime protocol, so that I can call my friends from within Linux.

Probably never happening. The protocol became a moving target because of patent suits, and made to rely upon Apple servers to a much greater extent.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-pate...

http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/04/apple-ordered-to-pay-625m-t...

Didn't Google recently start making hangouts calls use peer to peer connections?http://9to5google.com/2016/02/04/hangouts-improved-peer-to-p... What do they do differently from what Apple did initially?

They can't. It uses a bunch of technologies they licensed, but which they have no rights to open up for others to implement. Apparently when he made the announcement Steve Jobs thought that it was all based on open technology, but the licensing turned out to be a can of worms.

You know there are dozens of video chat apps that interoperate between OS X and Linux, right? Try Google Hangouts, ooVoo, or Skype.

Point is FaceTime is a native app and if it was possible to interface with it, developers would do so.

I'm not willing to install another browser plugin to enable video chat anymore.

Until video chat works without plugins I'm using the standalone apps.

I know chrome bundles the hangouts plugin. I wish it didn't and worked without plugins.

Chrome doesn't bundle a plugin for hangouts, they use WebRTC. They use the plugin on other browsers that don't have WebRTC.

No, they use a bunch of nonstandard extensions to WebRTC that basically amounts to the plugin. This is why the plugin is required on Firefox, even though it supports WebRTC.

https://webrtchacks.com/hangout-analysis-philipp-hancke/

That sounds really presumptuous, since chances are high @amelius knows about the alternatives, and since it's still a great point even with the alternatives; if I want to use Linux, great, good for me, but I'm not going to walk around trying to convince all my friends & family that are happily using FaceTime to switch to something that requires an installation, is harder to use, and is not integrated with the calling features of their devices.

None of your examples deliver sound quality that comes anywhere near that of FaceTime Audio.

What a load of crap.

Yes, but FaceTime use of bandwidth is an order of magnitude smaller...

In additino, Skype is not updated in Linux since ages

I am curious about this, since I assumed that Google would have put in quite a bit of effort to make sure that Hangouts is competitive in terms of bandwidth usage across platforms.

Do you have any performance figures? And a harder question: any ideas as to why this is the case?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com