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Comment by kyro | Hacker News Reader

I'll take this opportunity to kindly request that someone build an alternative to gTalk and Skype for video chatting. The forums for both are filled with complaints that do not ever get answered. Both products are huge resource hogs – gTalk will freeze my browser and Skype repeatedly disconnects and just slows down my entire machine. And it seems to happen to many, many people out there. On top of that, we all know Google offers little to no customer service, and it seems as if the Skype folks have just completely abandoned addressing any issues.

I've said this before: we are long, long overdue for a gTalk/Skype killer for video chat. At this point, I'm willing to pay for something better.

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I agree we're overdue for a Skype killer. The technology that's going to power it is called "WebRTC".

http://www.webrtc.org/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/basics/

Watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8C8ouiXHHk

You can play with WebRTC now in Google Chrome. Enable the chrome://flags: http://www.webrtc.org/running-the-demos

Then play with this demo: https://webrtc-demos.appspot.com/html/gum1.html

Then play with the source code: http://code.google.com/p/webrtc-samples/source/browse/#svn%2...

Have fun!

Please don't build another 'You should "upgrade" your browser to Chrome' service.

WebRTC might be cool, the demo looks cool, but the official site says that it might break or go away anytime and - please, please, please never ignore this - only one single browser seems to support that tech.

Fool around with it, but this can _never_ be part of a Skype killer until everyone can use it.

You are aware that Skype requires the Skype client, even less standards-based than Chrome, and everyone can use it? You can use Chrome and Skype alongside your web browser of choice. Chrome is spritually like the Mozilla/XUL of old -- it's a platform for apps, not just a web browser.

_never_ really?

step 1 - download dev version of chrome into a separate folder

step 2 - enable webrtc in flags://

step 3 - put a shortcut on your Desktop that points to this and says "Skype-NG" or something like that.

How is that different now than going and clicking on Skype from running and launching point of view. Bonus points, can also browse the web if you want.

Skype also might break or might go away anytime too. Or, rather, more likely will interrupt your video stream every 5 minutes to show you adds about dating sites and Nigerian scams.

how about:

1. download some 1MB binary. No depends or 3rd lib runtime or shit.

2. BAM! Voice and video group chat. S2S federated with all other XMPPs.

So both are pretty easy and neither is unrealistically impossible as the grandparent suggested...

Sure beats a "you should install our binary" service. WebRTC is also an open standard backed by the W3C and will have support in other browsers soon (FireFox/Opera/IE, no word yet from Apple).

Support is already being added in Firefox. Skype posted a position a while back about a WebRTC hire. I'm not sure why people act like it's some fringe thing. It's already not.

I betting Opera and Firefox will implement it. They already have the getUserMedia api for the mic and camera.

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/04/webrtc-efforts-underway-at-...

Someone could (and should!) take the webrtc c++ libraries and use those to create their own native client app -- which would not be dependent on the Chrome browser.

I'm currently building support for this into Candy, a multiuser javascript based xmpp client:

http://candy-chat.github.com/candy-webrtc/

If everything works, candy should be able to connect to gTalk as well, at some point. (Uses Jingle for transferring SDP to the participant).

I think that multiple peer connection support has landed in Chrome. Time to integrate the ROAP over JSEP and fix my code up and I should have a basic multi-peer p2p video chat demo working.

There's an XMPP extension for voice/video called Jingle, which a number of open source clients implement - one of them is Empathy, but I think Pidgin has a voice/video branch as well (or had it the last time I looked). Gtalk actually uses Jingle as well, so it's interoperable.

That said, one of the problems with open source solutions is that you often need a proxy (usually then both parties are behind nat), which opensource apps obviously can't provide/maintain.

On linux Empathy, Gajim, Jitsi, and Pidgin all support audio and video chat. I believe they're all interoperable with each other and with the video chat in gmail.

I think that Jitsi (formerly named SIP Communicator) supports audio and video chat on Windows and OS X as well.

https://jitsi.org/

Not sure, GTalk the Windows app at least is not compatible and the browser plugin seems not to be either, because Google uses a pre-standard version of Jingle that is not supported by Gajim. They claimed to update the client.. some years ago, nothing happened.

You refering to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2689512 ?

I use Google Talk via Empathy (and Telepathy) and it works very well; it appears to be extremely stable and the call quality is decent. Video worked when I tested it, but it's not something I use regularly. Empathy is improving - it's not quite as nice to use as some other IM clients, but it does what I need it to do.

http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/

Also please make it extremely secure and encrypted. Microsoft and Skype are doing the world a huge disservice right now by making Skype fully wiretappable by any and all law enforcement agencies and even the police in US. The world deserves better.

And, let me guess, you don't want to pay any money for this?

Really? We're still throwing out this extremely inaccurate information? Honestly? All they did was change supernodes for directory lookups. Almost every time the data is peer-to-peer unless someone is behind full-cone-NAT which REQUIRES tunneling the data.

If you're going to downvote, at least mention why.

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