I have been praying to see video conferencing work on Linux since Quickcam came out with their first camera. We have had such an application in GNOME for a while. But the missing piece has always been, how do I convince Mac and Windows using friends to jump technical through hoops so that they could see my pretty face.
It seems like soon all the kids will be using Google Talk’s video feature. And now more and more laptops have integrated cameras, so people don’t have to fish around for the dusty webcam in the cabinet.
I am glad to see that Empathy has finally been accepted as a GNOME module, so my only hope is that by the next GNOME release it will inter-operate with Google’s application.
As far as I understand, the app works through flash’ video capture API. The Linux version of Flash supports v4l/v4l2 (see official Adobe/Linux pinguin blog), so no empathy is required if you decide that using non-free software such as the Adobe flash plugin is an acceptable approach.
Empathy interacts with Google Talk just fine, right down to the VoIP….
Gnomemeeting has been renamed to ekiga since years now, and you can use different software on different platforms if you want, since it’s using open protocols :
http://wiki.ekiga.org/index.php/Ekiga_Interoperability
The new google talk video chat plugin does not use flash, and current releases of Empathy do not work with it. But the collabora guys already have audio interoperability going and I’m sure they’re working on video.
Releases of Empathy do not work with google plugin.