Ubuntu – Audo/video with pidgin

10.10pidginsoundvideo

Does anyone know how to make audio and video calls work with Pidgin (for those protocols that support it)?

Video is supposed to work on MSN, and audio is supposed to work on Google Talk, but whatever I try the Media->Audio Call and Media->Video Call menu options are always greyed out. My microphone and webcam are plugged in and work (and Empathy's video preferences can see them), so I know it's not a hadware problem; I have installed libgstfarsight0.10-0 and gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad; but I still can't make pidgin do audio calls.

This is with Pidgin 2.7.3 and Maverick.

Any ideas?

Best Answer

According to the Pidgin voice and video trac not much work has been done on MSN. XMPP (and Google Talk) should work.

According to here you need both gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly and gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg.

Why is there a greyed-out option? As a placeholder. Yes, farsight has MSN Webcam support but according to the imfreedom wiki "is a unidirectional Video only conversation".

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to automatically switch to USB headset when plugged in

This is actually a bug in Pulseaudio.

Here is a recent bug report on the situation, but it might be a dupe of this older (but reportedly fixed) one.

Here's a workaround that you could possibly use. Create a text file and paste this in:

#! /bin/bash

amixer cset iface=MIXER,name='Input Source' 1
amixer cset iface=MIXER,name='Output Source' 1
exit

If it is fact your third one then you should replace the end numbers on the commands with the number '2'. If fourth, then '3'. And so on.

You can then make a launcher on the panel and click on it every time you plug in the headset. It's an ugly workaround for now but until it is fixed (i.e. Pulseaudio remembers preferred devices) I don't see much else you can do.

You could do some extreme crazy workaround involving writing udev rules.... but is it worth it? ;)

Ubuntu – Google Talk Plugin in GMail on MacBook 2,1

Do you have microphone problems "everywhere", or is it limited to the gtalk plugin?

Also, did you make sure that your microphone isn't muted?

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to automatically switch to USB headset when plugged in

Ubuntu – Google Talk Plugin in GMail on MacBook 2,1

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