It’s Face Time: Google Talk For Android Phones Gets Video Chat Support | Hacker News Reader

It’s Face Time: Google Talk For Android Phones Gets Video Chat Support

techcrunch.com

51 pointscmeiklejohn33 comments

Is there a technical reason why Google has to push out a new variant of Android (2.3+) instead of making the app/service available as an APK?

Yet another reason if you get an Android phone you shouldn't get anything but a Nexus.

According to the article, it will shortly be rolling out to all other 2.3 phones. The Nexus S is getting it first, but not exclusively.

This will probably come off as snarky, but besides the Nexus series, what other phones are there running 2.3 at this point?

Any phone running CyanogenMod 7 and the Xperia Play, at the very least.

HTC's has a new 1.2ghz dual-core phone which already has it, I am expecting an upgrade to my Desire in a couple of weeks.

Maybe I'm just dumb, but I don't really understand why video chat on a phone is a big deal. Most of the time when I'm on the phone, I'm walking around town, or what have you. The rest I'm already sitting at my desk in front of my computer. I'd think if I video chatted and tried to walk around I'd just end up hurting myself, and if I sat down, I'd rather be on my computer with a larger screen...

Different use cases for different people. I'd love to have video chat on my phone for when I travel for work. It'd be great to video chat with my kids while I'm away. We could do that with our laptop, but that'd require me to be in my hotel room, with my lap. Then I'd have to call my wife, have her dig out her laptop.. etc. Basically it's enough of a pain that we never do it, we just have plain old fashioned voice calls.

But, if video chat was integrated into our phones (and particularly if it wasn't restricted to wifi only like FaceTime), then video chat would be as easy and frictionless as voice calls. I think I'd probably use it a lot under those conditions.

One of the main selling points of Apple FaceTime was that the front cam was positioned in such a way that the video call made it look like the two callers were looking at each other directly, rather than looking at a screen, which made the video call seem much more natural.

I wouldn't make a video call while walking around, but I'd much rather make a FaceTime call than use skype on my laptop, especially if its with a loved one.

Very well said, and I agree to a certain extent. We'll have to see what actual users have to say about this.

My guess is that the portability of the front camera on the phone means that you can not only show yourself, but also point to things around you at ease. This isn't something that can be done easily with a computer (or even a laptop for that matter).

Anyone know how Google Talk's video chat works compared to Apple's FaceTime? Is there a reason everyone can't agree on a standard?

Anyone know how Google Talk's video chat works compared to Apple's FaceTime?

Google: Jingle (created at Google), an extension of Jabber/XMPP for signaling, RTP for media, H.264 video, GIPS (acquired by Google) audio

Apple: SIP/STUN/TURN/BuzzwordBingo for signaling/NAT traversal, RTP for media, H.264 video, AAC audio

Is there a reason everyone can't agree on a standard?

a) Google: not-invented-here-syndrome

b) Apple: massive lock-in

c) Skype: see Apple

>Is there a reason everyone can't agree on a standard? a) Google: not-invented-here-syndrome

To be fair, I'm not aware of any standard that existed when Google first released Google Talk video/voice. It is pretty strongly standards-based, though, and uses appropriate extension points in standard protocols (Jingle on XMPP).

Bit of a history here, but SIP had been around for a couple of years when Google Talk was released.

I spoke to Chris Sacca, who was part of the Google Talk team (if I'm not mistaken) at Startup School a couple of years ago, and he told me that the 'SIP gateways' would be coming online shortly. This must have been in 06/07'.

If memory serves well, the reasons why Google didn't go with SIP at the time had to do with federation and trust between different SIP domains. So it was mostly security and anti-SPAM related. They were meaning to do the right thing - i.e. being open - but found that SIP could not serve their needs.

Part of the problem is that no good standard exists.

RTP is a complete unusable disaster: it's incredibly overcomplicated and almost no system supports more than an arbitrary and incompatible subset of the spec, so almost all RTP systems end up being incompatible with everything else.

It didn't help that the IETF refused to admit NATs exist, and every other home router added poor "fixup" code that usually just breaks things even more. (Although, that's more on the SIP side.)

While Skype is indeed a massive lock-in because it's proprietary end to end I wouldn't say FaceTime is. Given how 99% of it is standard, I expect "anyone" with enough intent could reverse engineer the glue. It has been done for AirTunes/AirPlay already. I'd say it's in the same state as was GTalk when it started and Jingle was not published at the time.

Agreed, I was quite happy to see Apple use the most current IETF standards, alas with some secret sauce (the missing 1%). However, the fact that FaceTime only works through Apple's SIP and NAT traversal infrastructure (assumed, since they seem to use TURN) effectively makes them the owners of all FaceTime users identity.

We will have to see how much they open things up. My guess would be that they allow others to make FaceTime clients, but keep control of the server side.

In theory, Apple could make an end-run around the telcos, since they will eventually have a huge directory of phone numbers and email addresses for all FaceTime users. At that point the carriers truly become a dumb pipe. Maybe that is Apple's plan, after all.

> RTP for media, H.264 video, GIPS (acquired by Google) audio

Google use Speex in Jingle now.

Google also uses ICE-UDP and STUN, although the implementation was done before ICE-UDP was standardized, so it doesn't quite follow the standard yet.

Also, Google speaks many audio codecs, including speex. ISAC (the codec from GIPS) is just the default.

AFAIK Apple still hasn't released the open specs for FaceTime while google talk has been open from the start.

I wonder why they haven't. They said they were going to, and I believe most of it has open specs, but not all. It's been 10 months...

Google Talk is standard. It's all XMPP, which is a kick-ass push-based messaging protocol.

My information might be a bit stale so this is as much a question as a statement, but I believe that Google Talk does not quite follow the Jingle XEP. They claim to be working very hard on bringing Gmail Chat in line with the spec, which I presume diverged from their working implementation.

That is correct. We are working hard on it.

By the way, libjingle, the Open Source library for writing jingle applications, already mostly speaks XEP-166 and XEP-167. We're still working on XEP-176, though. http://code.google.com/p/libjingle

I have a nifty idea for a small project which would make use of libjingle, and I'm about ready to go buy a camera for my desktop to work on it. Is libjingle to the point where I could interact with my Google Talk contacts in their browsers? My other option is libpurple and their implementation and I am not very excited about that prospect :)

Last I checked, the protocol encoding for GTalk on Android had been modified to make it more lightweight for mobile -- it could be an entirely different protocol, not sure. XML FTL.

Google Talk on Android uses the same XMPP-based signaling as all the other Google Talk products (gmail, the win32 app, etc).

Sounded like they were moving towards a different encoding though. Is this still valid? http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=201#c1

Actually Google Talk diverges quite heavily from the specification, and the other problem with XMPP is that it has several parts, and no clients implement all of it. In addition the mobile version of GTalk uses a proprietary protocol rather than XMPP to talk to Google's servers to reduce bandwidth.

> the mobile version of GTalk uses a proprietary protocol

That's a really irrelevant point to standards. With that logic you could argue that Opera Mini isn't a web browser because Opera servers download the HTML and convert it to a proprietary format for display on the device. Or that Bitlbee doesn't adhere to XMPP because users communicate to a Bitlbee server through an IRC client.

Actually, the standard deviated from the original implementation, as Google Talk pre-dated the standard. Either way, we're working on it.

Also, the mobile version uses the same protocol as all of the other products (such as gmail). You can take our Open Source library (http://code.google.com/p/libjingle) and use it to make an app that calls the mobile version, just like you can for the other products.

Who do I need to speak to to get Google Talk to not suck? I get signed out several times per hour on my phone, several times per-day through the web interface, and I have a list of bugs as long as my arm I could give you (although perhaps some of these bugs are XMPP rather than Google bugs, I don't know which are which).

The funny thing is that if you actually made Google Talk good, it could easily be the #1 chat application. XMPP Transports are far and away the best solution for managing presence on multiple protocols, if Google provided reliable transports for AIM, Live, FB etc then, combined with the (absolutely awesome) centralised chat history feature you could definitely win users over (I have set up transports on my Google account anyway using Gajim and hot-chilli.net, and it's brilliant). However, GTalk doesn't support XEP-0030 or XEP-0144 which make the process a lot nicer.

Lastly, the desktop and web clients are both a complete joke. The web client can become disconnected without "realising" so your messages go into a black hole, and the desktop client steals focus which is an instant uninstall for me and for many other users.

Perhaps I'm being naive, but the problem of sending a message to a person and making sure they definitely get that message does not seem to be difficult. It works with very high reliability through GMail, for example, or when posting a comment on Hacker News... but for some reason as soon as we are in the domain of "IM" then reliability becomes a serious issue (except with Skype, which is the only IM client that gets this right (and that is the ONLY thing that Skype gets right)).

TLDR: Please make Google Talk good, because it really has huge potential and already has some massive advantages against the competition. Right now though, it has so many huge problems that frankly I think adding video message support is like polishing the brass on the Titanic.

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