I spent some time today attempting to find the most suitable VOIP client available in PCLOS for video calls.
I rarely use video during a call, but as it appears to be becoming more common (and SWMBO wants it!) I went through what is available to me.
I was not encouraged .... but I'll leave the gory details aside.
During this time I revisited Ekiga, which I have not used for some time, but had always liked.
The options list had been boiled down to Ekiga and Linphone ..... with a leaning towards Linphone due to its greater number of video codes, as my Ekiga install only provides two ..... theora and h261.
It was then I found this link
http://wiki.ekiga.org/index.php/Ekiga_Interoperabilitywhich shows Ekiga with the following video codecs ... H.261, H.263, H.263+, MPEG 4 Part 2, H.264, theora
and Linphone with ...... H.263+, MPEG 4 Part 2 and theora
After a bit of further investigation it appears that Ekiga needs to be compiled with the 'non-free' codecs as a deliberate choice, otherwise they cannot be used.
This page refers
http://wiki.ekiga.org/index.php/Compiling_Ekiga ffmpeg / libav
FFMPEG is required for the following video codecs:
MPEG 4 Part 2 Video via RFC 3016
H.264 via RFC 3984
H.263+ (H.263-1998) via RFC 2429 / RFC 4629
If you use ekiga >= 3.3.2, then you can install libav/ffmpeg 0.6.2 or later like this:
./configure --enable-shared
make
sudo make install
x264
x264 is required for the following video codecs:
H.264 via RFC 3984
If you use ekiga >= 3.3.2, then you can install libx264, version 107 or later like this:
./configure --enable-shared
make
sudo make install
So, if I understand this correctly it is possible to have those extra codecs available in Ekiga as well as other clients.
I suppose if it was thought necessary, there could be two versions of Ekiga in the repo ..... one with only free codecs and the other with full compatibility. That might be too much to expect though.
As there has been a new release of Ekiga recently, which addresses a lot of bugs and a security issue, I would request the packager to consider including those extra codecs.
Thanks for reading and considering the proposal.
