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Comment by senko | Hacker News Reader

Yes but not quite; they somewhat sidestepped Jingle standardisation process and extended then-current standard to suit their use case. They also primarily use(d) H.264/SVC which doesn't have readily usable free/open implementations. (more at my rant & google/xmpp dev comments here: http://senko.net/gmail-videochat-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ug...)

The good news is that since that announcement Google have been working with 3rd party devs to enable interoperability.

So (AFAIK) nowadays H.264/AVC should be working and there are implementations (Telepathy/Farsight that I know of, possibly others) that have experimental video interop with GTalk.

EDIT: the original "NIHd Jingle" comment is a bit too harsh (as the drafts of Jingle spec were changing very rapidly at the time), edited for clarity.

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Their implementation of all things Jingle came in advance of any specification, so it's not fair to call it NIH. See this comment for more info: http://senko.net/gmail-videochat-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ug...

Considering that Google basically reinvented SIP using Jabber, I think calling it NIH syndrome is more then fair.

Google needed a robust and open IM protocol, which SIP wasn't in 2004/5. So they picked Jabber/XMPP and then bolted media signaling onto it (which is patterned after SIP).

They should really support SIP by now. But it's pretty clear at this point, that they are not a player in the telco space.

Check this: https://www.gtalk2voip.com/

So as someone mooting the idea of writing a toy IM/comms server for me and my friends, would you recommend going with SIP over, say, XMPP?

Since you seem to know what you're talking about, unlike myself : D

For IM, XMPP would be a wise choice. SIP could be be used as part of your voice/video solution but they are different things and as such you wouldn't choose one over the other unless you were choosing IM over voice/video.

Google chose XMPP and developed Jingle as an extension to allow for voice/video.

You could just build your setup on Google's services and take advantage of Google Apps for your domain.

Thanks for the reply. I'd want to offer both voice and IM - I actually didn't know SIP could do IM but a comment above made me realise it does.

Guess I'll have to check them both out more. I'd actually started a bit with XMPP but honestly I really don't like it, so was kind of hoping SIP could fit the bill .. more research needed : D

I'm not sure if you'll read this, since it's been so long, but here goes.

Depending on what you plan to do, if you want to be 'standards compliant', I'd look into SIP, and it's IM extension called SIMPLE.

What's interesting here is, that the 3GPP body - defining the telco standards of the future - has chosen SIP as it's signalling protocol for media sessions (voice + video), but also for IM. In addition there is a 'network address book' (= server side contact list) standard based on XCAP.

All of the above are part of what's called IMS, the IP based communications infrastructure for future telco networks.

A good library for SIP client development is PJSIP.

If you are just in need of a good IM infrastructure, XMPP/Jabber seems to be better suited.

Yeah, edited my comment to clarify what I meant. Note that the voice interop has been working nicely for a long time, it's the video where the things got confusing.

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