Empathy (and Pidgin), Telepathy, Farsight, GStreamer and Gmail videochat

This post is solely for the benefit of people googling randomly, scratching their heads.

If you're trying to do a videochat with a Gmail user, but it doesn't work (it connects and then disconnects directly), chances are you may see the same issue I did.

If that's the case, the list of video codecs you present will most likely consist of JPEG, THEORA and MPV (without any H264 or H263).

What you need is most likely a ffmpeg package for GStreamer. On Ubuntu karmic, gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg is the right one. After a

sudo aptitude install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-tools; gst-inspect-0.10

things should be better (you will need to restart Empathy/Pidgin).

Sipdroid and asterisk

If you haven't found it yet, sipdroid is a small, reasonably well integrated sip client for android phones. If you install the version not available on market, you can also use it while using your 3g connection.

One drawback is that it doesn't neccessary play nice with Asterisk out of the box, these are the things I had to address to get it running smoothly (of course, YMMV).

You're most likely being NATed by your operator (if you want to be sure, you can install WhatIsMyIp and check), so

nat=yes

is pretty much a given. However, you do need

qualify=no

or your Asterisk will consider the phone unreachable.

Also, sipdroid currently only supports alaw, so you should make sure that no other codec will suddenly be required. If your asterisk is suitably located [low latency] and have ample cpu, you can use canreinvite=no for that, otherwise, you can try to restrict those you connect to so only alaw will be used, but that way may have many hidden surprises, especially if one of them is a PSTN operator.

Some app ideas, and then some

I got me one of them Android phones a little more than a month ago. Because of this, I may start posting random stuff for the benefit of people Googling, but also ideas for applications I want (and would pay for).