Bret Busby <bret.bu...@gmail.com> writes: > On 03/08/2014, Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglas...@affinityvision.com.au> > wrote: >> On 3/08/2014 4:39 AM, Brian wrote: >>> On Sun 03 Aug 2014 at 01:29:57 +0800, Bret Busby wrote: >>> There is no substitute for Skype (either the software or the service) >>> whether it be open or closed source, >> >> What about Google Hangouts? That might be a reasonable substitute.... > > Google? That is even more sinister than the NSA, isn't it? The NSA > doesn't drive around suburbia, filming everyone in their yards. (snip)
At least that you've noticed. (-: A persistently irritating problem with both Skype and Google Hangouts, at least for me, is that they have consistently worked far better and more reliably than any of the open-source alternatives! However, Skype don't even seem to bother offering amd64 packages so, as with acroread, I run it from a 32-bit chroot -- I thus guess that their interest in supporting Linux is minimal. (I am also irritated with how Google's package sneakily adds its own /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ file.) I put some effort into getting Linphone and Jitsi working, and over several years now Ekiga -- including compiling patched versions, capturing and sharing so many debug logs, trying different combinations of codecs, etc. -- and, while the Ekiga developers are consistently communicative and helpful, I never managed to get to a point where I could make a call with any confidence that we would have audio and video going in both directions for as long as we wanted to talk. It's been both surprising and frustrating as I don't see technically why we shouldn't be able to get it to work better: the networks and NAT traversal seem otherwise reliable when I test the same ports with nc and am doing other stuff remotely with those systems. In some cases I can actually ssh into the machines of the people I would like to call, and sudo -- I've caught myself wondering if I could just construct some pipeline of commands to capture, encode, forward and play audio and video streams, with the help of mplayer or whatever, allowing a poor man's version of open-source videotelephony without actually having to try to get any of the actual videotelephone software working well. -- Mark -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/87k36pwzvj....@ixod.org