Gnome 2.4 comes standard with GnomeMeeting 0.98.5, a Free video-conferencing application. I have used iSight/iChat and MSN Messenger with a web camera for quite a while now and so here’s how Gnomeemeeting compares to these other options.My $35 USB Creative Webcam Pro works fine with any Unix I have tried it with (BSD, Mandrake, JDS, RHL/Fedora, Slackware etc, but not on Mac OS X) and Gnomemeeting loads it successfully too. The first time you run Gnomemeeting it runs a wizard which sets up your microphone, video and personal information.
The Gnomemeeting window consists of a vertical toolbar, the video window and its controls, a chat view and a separate window which shows the server you are currently connected and its users. For me to get up and running I had to go to the preference panel and check the “IP Translation” option as I am behind a firewall. Gnomemeeting requires some ports to be open on your firewall to properly work. On the preference panel you can also set more options, like additional personal information, audio/video settings, etc.
To start chatting you need to connect to a lookup directory (the “server”). The default Gnomemeeting directory is ils.seconix.com and searching for all users usually reveals between 90 and 180 visible members online, depending on the time of the day (some users choose to be hidden). You can engage on a video chat and if something goes wrong in the connection (e.g. bad firewall setup preventing connection), there is always the fail safe traditional text chat.
Gnomemeeting has the ability to connect to NetMeeting servers but it requires a membership for these servers. Additionally, it can directly video phone via IP number (using a telephone-like dialpad) or function as a real phone via third party hardware.
Gnomemeeting is great to get in touch with other Unix users. It brings a modern sense to the “Linux/Unix user group” franchise. This is how I in fact met my friend Stella from Athens, Greece. Quite a surprise that the first Greek person I saw online via Gnomemeeting happened to be a female Slackware user!
There are a few downsides to Gnomemeeting currently: It is very difficult to find online chatters willing to chat with you. 50% of the time they won’t answer your call, 30% of the time they will time out, while the rest of the time Gnomemeeting will incorrectly say that the other person doesn’t run Gnomemeeting (though they do). In my opinion, Gaim and Gnomemeeting should become one and the same project. Having such a small community of 200 users is… romantic, but not practical. It doesn’t guarantee broad success for the project. Moreover, people want videoconferencing with family members too, and most of them are likely to run MSN or Yahoo!’s web camera services (especially MSN). Gnomemeeting, with the help of Gaim and some reverse engineering, could do it. In the meantime, Microsoft has put NetMeeting to sleep and so NetMeeting interoperation is probably irrelevant.
Another problem is the necessity to adjust firewall settings, since if you don’t have access it can be tricky to work with GM as intended. MSN Messenger and OSX’s iSight do not have such strict requirements, though they do require some ports open in order to work even better on a “normal” Firewall setup. Most of the time they work as intended, but with Gnomemeeting you never know if you won’t be able to get video, or to get video but don’t get sound each time etc. It really depends on per-connection basis and how the other person is setup and how he/she has arranged the audio/video plugins.
Another problem which is really a video driver problem more than a GM one: my camera needs brightness adjustment all the time. The GM guys said that this is a driver bug (OV511 driver) and I would need to email the author of that driver.
A nice addition to Gnomemeeting would be the ability to save as .mpg or other video format your own video or a video chat (you never know if you’ll want to leave your will in a video format, or simply to record something and then burn it as VCD and send it to the family).
Overall, Gnomemeeting is one of the very interesting Linux/Unix apps for video-conferencing and while there are still problems here and there it is a sexy and fun app to run. It is not as polished usability-wise as the iSight/iChat combo, but it does the job. Get a supported cheap web camera if you already don’t have one (you don’t really need the latest and the greatest) and come join the *nix geeks online! You never know, you might meet the love of your life over there (well, it was IRC for me back in the day, but technology progresses, now you will be able to see to whom you are talking to ;-).
As always, the GnomeMeeting project needs more developers, so if you are into that kind of development fun, step in and help out. Gnomemeeting 1.0 will be featuring plugins, ALSA support, better addressbook and wizard setup.
Yes, I am planning to do a KDE 3.2 review when it is out, but please keep the discussion on topic. Read tomorrow my JDS review where I mention KDE on JDS btw.
Microsoft’s video/audio conferencing junk (especially with MSN Messenger) switched to dynamic ports, which makes it nearly impossible for hardware firewall/router/gateway devices to allow such traffic.
It REALLY annoys me. Anyone know of good Win32 alternatives?
just curious to know if you have had a chance to try yahoo’s voice/video conferencing (especially in super mode), and how it compares with Gnomemeeting, MSN & iChat/iSight.
Yes, Yahoo is “ok” but the super-mode never works. At least not for me, even when I am directly IP-to-IP. The normal mode is so-so. I think MSN’s video works better than Yahoo!. The best of all is iSight/iChat though. There is no parallel to the usability, performance, ease of use and setup.
That’s great to hear =)
Also, I too think that it is essential for GNOMEMeeting to interoperate with other popular software on Windows, because without doing so it is limited to the minuscule market share that Linux has, unless of course Linux takes over the world overnight
Interoperability would open GNOMEMeeting users to a far larger number of people, make it much more useful for businesses and much more widespread. Unfortunately, doing this is also very costly in terms of development time.
Last note that is offtopic: I thought JDS or more appropriately named SDS, (Why Java? Its just branding.) was GNOME only and also it is supposed to be released this month right?
Yes, there is no KDE on JDS, and this is why I mention it. Now please stop the off topic discussion because it draws people to reply on that stuff.
I agree that for it to really take off it needs to be merged into gaim. It’s just not at the modern day level of convienience to need to open a seperate program depending on if you want text or video chat. I’ve never used Gnomemeeting(no webcam), but what kind of video quality/bandwidth usage does it have? Last time I tried webcams(in 97) the video quality was terrible.
Hi,
one short question: Does the Webcam “Creative Webcam Pro” really work with FreeBSD? I just had a look into the Hardware-List of 5.1 and didn’t find it…
Yes, it does, this chipset which is used by many cameras (OmniVision OV511+) is supported by FreeBSD, at least when I tried it on FreeBSD 4.7.
Who’s that guy on the picture? Is it your husban Eugenia?
No, I don’t need to video conference with my husband, he is next to me.
That guy is Killian, he is with the Gnomemeeting developers and also friend of Stella’s.
I thought you were cheating on ur hubby, with sancho
No, I am a good girl and my JBQ is the sweetest guy in the world. Besides, why do you need to only think dirty of video conferencing? With iSight/iChat I have met some interesting tech people and also got back together with friends after years of “losing” eachother (e.g. ex-Be engineers who are now using OSX).
I mostly wanted to use webcams to be in touch with my family in Greece, but unfortunately my brother’s bandwidth sucks and we are never able to connect properly.
“Gaim and Gnomemeeting should become one and the same project”
I agree 100% – or at the very least it should have indistinguishable interoperability. When I am chatting with friends on MSN Messenger it is sooooo easy to just click the webcam button and then the audio button and have both and not have to do anything else, it’s just awesome.
I just wish the Gaim folks would worry less about being cross platform (that’s the perception, maybe not the reality at this time). The gain for the relatively few users on Windows is not worth the loss of the GNOME platform integration and the inability to do webcam stuff.
Perhaps the GnomeMeeting folks could snag the GAIM source and do the integration there?
“Gnomemeeting will incorrectly say that the other person doesn’t run Gnomemeeting”
That happens when the person has not unregistered from ILS or when a firewall blocks his incoming port.
“Gaim and Gnomemeeting should become one and the same project. Having such a small community of 200 users is”
I have to disagree here. You are not forced to register on ILS for being able to use GnomeMeeting. Recent polls have shown that most users do not use ILS to get in touch with they family or friends.
Also, don’t forget GnomeMeeting is a VoIP/IP Telephony application with videoconferencing features, while iChat is an IM application with videoconferencing features. The big difference is that GnomeMeeting can be used as softphone in companies and infrastructures using Voice Over IP, and things like MCU’s, gatekeepers, IPBX’es like Asterisk or commercial ones, … Integrating it with something like gaim, and having something as simple as iChat, would mean loosing all those features.
Gonomeeting proved to be unstable in some setups
H.323 interoperability with Gatekeepers not so good
H.263 (H.263 Annex F and so on, not there!)
To Eugenia .. this is a videoconference H.323 application .. you cannot compare it to GAIM at all.
BTW this is the only VDCa pp for unix h.323 based, no need to marge it with IM apps.
IM is becoming the fuure .. but there is the ned for Gnome Meeting to grow and follow standards.
Today SIP is a mess … drafts drafts for everything …
Gonomeeting proved to be unstable in some setups
H.323 interoperability with Gatekeepers not so good
Can you explain further? have you discussed it with developers?
H.263 (H.263 Annex F and so on, not there!)
That’s patented!
If they distinctions don’t matter to the most users then it’s probably not a useful distinction. I think most users don’t care about the distinctions between Gnomemeeting and Gaim mentioned so far.
Stella is hot. Geek hotties are the best.
I have to say that I don’t understand Christian’s comment about gatekeepers. I have been using GnomeMeeting since early versions with gatekeepers (I have even been using it before there was a gatekeeper support actually) and it has always worked very smoothly.
I (my company) use a commercial gatekeeper (manufactured by NetCentrex – RadVision stack) and the GnuGK (based on OpenH323) and both work great with GnomeMeeting. Besides, GnomeMeeting has H235 support, which allows it to securely authenticate to a GK, unlike most other VoIP products.
I also have to point out that GM has a Quicknet support, which allows a cheap analog phone to be plugged into your PC and thus provides a better voice compression quality, and an increased comfort of use.
Finally, GM supports call transfer, call hold etc, which makes it a definitive VoIP app.
Sorry if this post was longer than expected, I couldn’t help filling the gaps left by the article (and its comments) 🙂
Eugenia,
have You tried the macam Webcam drivers for OSX (http://webcam-osx.sourceforge.net)? I got my unsupported Logitech webcam running.
The best bit about them teaming up would be they could drop the “G” and “Gnome”. I’ve alwayas despised that trend – “Kthis, Gthis, GnomeThis” etc.
I know it is sad, i’m just particular about it.
An alternative to MSN ? Well, for voice at least there is Skype, from the programmers that invented Kazaa. It uses p2p-technology for voice chatting. In other words, tunneling over the http-port and using people’s upload to route the call. It is a hype, haven’t tried it myself though… Audio quality is meant to be good but i dunno muc more…
Simon
I just wanted to add that a plugin infrastructure for gnomemeeting should be developed for any *nix messenger client. Not just Gaim. Last time I heard Gaim isn’t part of the GNOME project, and isn’t interested in becoming a part of it.
Since most *nix projects are designed to be modular, Gaim included, I see very few obstacles in designing a GnomeMeeting plugin infrastructure for any most of the messenger clients.
would be a good idea for the next gnome bounty-hunt (but might be costly, though…)
Please note that you don’t need a webcam to use GnomeMeeting. It’s meant to be useful for Voice-Over-IP as well as video conferencing. You just need a microphone and speakers for that – which you’ll find on just about every laptop. So you can use it, for instance, to make cheap international phone calls.
but Eugenia looks different in every picture i see of her, completely different from the picture on her personal website or the ones when she tested the iSight some time ago. But still pretty in all of them though
Many people are still confusing GnomeMeeting with an Instant Messenger. I have reacted to this in my blog and explained why it was different, and why it will stay different. You can read it here : http://www.advogato.org/person/dsandras
I don’t think they need to merge. But a plug-in for gaim that takes your IP address start gnomemeting and send and invitation to the othe gaim/msm user to start using gnomeeting/netmeeting would be nice… Cause frankly my relatives and fiends say: ‘Ah?’ When I ask them their IP address.
Someone mail the gaim developers please
GNOMEMeeting is one of those apps that I might use if it didn’t depend on GNOME. I can grab from V4L devices and encode to MPEG (or another format) just fine without GNOME. Then why does GM require me to install all those libraries?
Perhaps someone would be interested in starting a project to implement a simple video chat app that Just Works and doesn’t depend on anything besides what it actually needs?
What useless dependancies?
Please tell me I am not the only one that sees a spooky similarity between Eugenia and another famous free software celebrity:
http://darq.net/~kaneda/spooky.jpg
Hmm!
He he, your bad.
They’re both strong of will.
In any case. How well does GM do on low-bandwith connections, like dialup?
be prepaied for a slashdotting, i was just over there and they linked OSNews in a discussion about this article…
Gnome is needed for all those fancy widgets, hence the name GNOMEMeeting. If you were too remove those dependencies you’d have one ugly looking app, think Unix Acrobat Reader.
/me shudders
The Marratech tools might be a good alternative. Works on Windows, Mac and Linux and handled NAT/FW “perfectly”. Client is free. http://www.marratech.com/ Download a client and then go to emeetingportal.com and chat with your friends!
I’m not sure where this info came from but as of Windows XP you can just
Start->Run->conf
and there is netmeeting. MS hid netmeeting in order to get more people to subscribe to MSN and other services they are providing with netmeeting support. RDesktop would be sort of equivalent and a cool feature too
Could somebody point to a really current list of webcams that work with this package. It might make a good addendum to the review as well.
Bo
strange you quote the de facto leader .. radvision …
becouse I am certified in all the RVSN products …
founds some issues
radvision stack = 85% of the market
pleaae no flames about opensource stacks now!
there is not H.263 .. and FFMPEG is supporting it .. is it only a matter of patent pending so?
I did not want to give a bad impression on Gnomeeting with my comments .. here we find it a really good application especially considering that it is OSS ad H.323 is not an easy task.
Will send some feedback to the developers willing to help a bit.
Does anyone know if GnomeMeeting works with Freeworlddialup?
iVisit
http://www.ivisit.com/
http://myphone.sourceforge.net/
btw, regarding article & issue of small user base of gnomemeeting, netmeeting, etc.
Luckily, here MSN Messenger never became popular – so if someone is videoconferencing she/he uses netmeeting. OTOH it doesn’t mean much – webcams aren’t very popular, and “official” local videoconferencing server usually has something like 100 users anyway
GnomeMeeting should be able to join those “NetMeeting” servers, which you can find friends there.
If you’re talking this to me, QnA…that was exactly my point – it is good that MSN isn’t popular, and Netmeeting is – it causes some kind of “standarization” and interoperability :>
I’m using Gnomemeeting every week to connect to my parents who have Netmeeting that came with WindowsME (like many others) It works perfectly. Even though it goes to a NAT router on one side and a firewall at the other side. There is a gnomemeeting option to force Netmeeting to use certain ports.
I’m not in the directory as I’m neither willing to chat – not to expose my IP – only conferencing.
Conrad