Voice & Video Chat

Adium does not currently have any Voice or Video (webcam) Chat functionality. The Adium team is aware that many users want to be able to audio/video chat.

Adium depends on libpurple for its protocol-level functionality, which means that information sent or received over (most) protocols must go through libpurple. We therefore can not offer audio/video capabilities until libpurple does; the Pidgin team is working on implementing such features, but there is not currently any ETA on when they will be available.

Please don't file tickets requesting or voicing further support for implementation. Every minute a developer spends handling a duplicate ticket is one less minute working on Adium itself. The original ticket requesting this is #6; for plenty of people already having voiced support, and some developer responses, see that ticket.

But we're working on it

We're working with the libpurple team to bring voice chat and video chat to Adium and Pidgin. In Adium, this feature will require Mac OS X Leopard, because we're using new features in Leopard to implement it.

We are planning to be compatible with iChat, so you can probably expect AIM and Jabber (XMPP) to be the first protocols Adium can do voice and video chats over. We may also support MSN and Yahoo! at the same time, or we may support them later.

We're calling this Adium 2.0, because it will be a lot of work to do it.

We do not have a release date at this time, and there is no beta for you to test. Please be patient.

What about Skype?

We will not be supporting Skype. As we wrote in a post on the Adium Blog:

Skype is also a closed protocol. If it were an easy thing to break, other apps would have supported it long ago. This doesn't even take into account that there are also some VERY serious legal issues in regards to this. There has been a lot of discussion about this in the open source community and the lawyers involved have all recommended staying far far away from it.

Work by third parties

Adium will benefit from the work done by these projects:

• farsight: An effort to cooperate on the development of voice/video in open source IM clients.
• Gstreamer: A framework for audio and video compression

Adium may also benefit from work done by these projects:

• gaim-vv: An effort to get voice/video functionality into the popular IM client Pidgin (see libpurple). As of 2005-09-21, gaim-vv is being merged into Gaim CVS. It will still be awhile before this is useful to Adium, but it's important progress.
• IAXclient: Support for the IAX voice-and-video protocol. See also #2298.

Some third-party programs already offer indirect support for Adium. The Adium team is not affiliated with these projects and can not provide support related to them:

• iSpQ: A video chat network which provides a level of integration with Adium, reading open Adium chats and allowing sending of "PhotoIMs" to Adium contacts. To enable, check "Enable IM integration and show messenger Pals" in the General iSpQ Preferences.

Work within Adium

(Everything from this point down is for developers. If you're not a programmer, you can safely ignore it.)

The overall Audio and Video work breaks down into the following major areas:

• Protocol Support - To integrate with the various mechanisms used by the IM services to start and stop chat sessions.
• Network Transport Support? - Once a session is established, this portion of the code kicks in to send the Audio/Video data stream to the other user's computer.
• CODEC Support? - This encodes the raw voice and video data from the devices into something less bulky to send across the network.
• Voice Echo Cancellation? - Preventing feedback loops and echos when using Voice Chat
• OS Hardware Support? - Integration with the OS to be able to access camera, microphone, speaker, and monitor devices for capture and display.
• User Interface? - How adium presents Voice/Video chats, controls, status, and preferences.

Initial Implementation Criteria

We need to come up with what is good for for an initial implementation, and what can wait.

Keepers:

• 1 to 1 chat

Stuff to be implemented later:

• Echo Cancelation. People can use headphones for now.

Which services support Voice and Video?