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Comment by calebmpeterson | Hacker News Reader

In the event of this actually happening, what are some alternatives to Skype's video chat?

A personal solution is pretty easy using something like OpenFire[1], Red5[2] and the OpenFire Red5[3] and SIP[4] plugins.

Using this setup you can have an instant messenger, video chat and phone calls.

[1] http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/

[2] http://www.red5.org/

[3] http://code.google.com/p/redfire/

[4] http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/plugins.jsp (scroll down to SIP Phone Plugin)

Person-to-person video chat is a commodity. If there's a problem it is that there are too many solutions.

Yep. It seems Skype just won on brand name.

They won on NAT traversal, ease of installation and lack of obnoxious ads.

I've learned about Skype from my aunt who managed to install it and get it working without phoning me.

IMO XMPP/Jingle is the best alternative:

- Open standard

- Supports federation between different servers

- Open source cllients available

- Also integrated into GMail (that's the technology that is used when you do a voice or video call)

- Will be fully integrated into Android starting with version 2.3.4

Agreed. We were doing mobile video calls with XMPP with Nokia N800s already back in 2007

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bergie/399708279/

I've personally been looking into this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitsi

has anyone tried it? What do you think? I haven't gotten it to work yet,,,

I tried to use it for SIP recently and it did not work well for me at all. I am using Arch Linux and a tiling window manager. It doesn't seem to cooperate with my fairly normal sound setup and the interface is messed up on awesomewm at least. Not worth the effort.

The most reliable VoIP program I've found is twinkle, but it hasn't been updated in years afaik. I used Ekiga exclusively for SIP and video chat for several months but it was plagued with really annoying bugs, including frequent hard locks and unreliable presence/call functionalities.

I haven't been impressed with any Linux SIP/video chat applications to be honest. Empathy and Pidgin use gstreamer which usually doesn't work very well either. The most reliable video chat experience I've had is Skype, despite their buggy Linux client.

mumble has video planned (http://mumble.sf.net)

It is not p2p but that could be implemented separately AFAIK

flash, SIP video, facetime, AIM/MSN

can you elaborate on flash a little? thank you!

Elaborate how? It's been proven with sites like chatroulette. There are open source servers like red5:

http://code.google.com/p/red5/

Chatroulette is not really an alternative to skype, but the link was interesting. I think the OP was looking for a similar video chat client.

I've personally never used skype, but for 1-1 video chatting, gchat works pretty well. I use it nightly.

tinychat.com

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