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Ekiga 4.0 released
Version
4.0 of the Ekiga telephony application is out. It features a new
user interface, some new codecs, auto-answer functionality, a number of
improvements in SIP support, and more.
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Ekiga 4.0 released Posted Nov 29, 2012 15:22 UTC (Thu) by colo (subscriber, #45564) [Link]
While I very much welcome this new release, I must say that I so _NOT_ get it how "tray icon removal", for the sake of "better GNOME 3 integration", could be considered a good thing. If that means Ekiga is now effectively as (un)usable as Telepathy has become (from what I've seen in GNOME up to 3.4, that is), then well - I'm everything but stoked. :( Let's hope that's just a runtime-only change...
Ekiga 4.0 released Posted Nov 29, 2012 15:29 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
Huh? I'm running Ekiga 4.0 right now and it has a tray icon. I'm using the experimental KDE support though, so perhaps that's got something to do with it.
Ekiga 4.0 released Posted Nov 29, 2012 15:35 UTC (Thu) by colo (subscriber, #45564) [Link] I haven't tried Ekiga 4 (or anything leading to its final release) yet, but under "New Features and Improvements" in the announcement, the following is stated:Better GNOME 3 integration with improved notifications and tray icon removalIf that's indeed entirely optional/only enabled for GNOME 3 desktops, and Ekiga will integrate well with all other DEs, then everything is still fine and dandy of course :)
Ekiga 4.0 released Posted Dec 12, 2012 11:14 UTC (Wed) by ededu (subscriber, #64107) [Link]
It is late, however... With gnome-fallback the tray icon is not removed. Also, on systems without notification (e.g. Windows port) and where notifications do not ahve actions, notifications are not used and the call window is shown instead.
Ekiga 4.0 released Posted Nov 29, 2012 17:53 UTC (Thu) by gwolf (subscriber, #14632) [Link]
At some point in time, I had high hopes on Ekiga. It handled most Linux-supported hardware, and talked the two major industry standard protocols (SIP and H.323). Yes, both protocols (more the second than the first) are quite firewall unfriendly, but... With the help of STUN, it cannot be that bad, can it?
I had two major (and very different!) use cases for it. One was to allow for remote participation for an online Free Software and Education encounter we held at my university, and the other one was to talk with my girlfriend, who then lived in a different country.
As for the first one, it was very frustrating. The CODEC quality of Ekiga was abysmally low, so conferencing people often had interruptions, broken connections, freezes and whatnot. That, when they could connect — Even if my university has a Tandberg H.323 server/MCU, no amount of STUN was enough to get them to connect reliably. In the end, we did all kinds of hackery (including at some point calling the presentator by phone, because Ekiga sent the picture correctly but no audio was coming through, or locally displaying the presentation following their indications because of the opposite), or let our prejudices down and used Skype for some others.
As for my girlfriend... Well, I can only thank Ekiga for not being more reliably, as she moved to Mexico with me, and we are now married ;-)
Ekiga 4.0 released Posted Nov 30, 2012 18:13 UTC (Fri) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link]
All's well that ends well! XD
Rehdon
Ekiga 4.0 released Posted Dec 3, 2012 18:47 UTC (Mon) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link]
STUN is a complete disaster - it does a trick which most better firewalls (including shorewall, but excluding most consumer routers) manage to block. Worse, you can often end up with only one side of the RTP connection working, so having simplex audio, or no video. Finally, some routers play tricks on top of tricks - this means that a router might do the necessary siproxd stuff for the audio part, but not for the video part!
The reason it's necessary is because the central SIP registration server can easily handle the bandwidth for who is online and call-setup, but not for the actual call (it would make it really expensive for eg ekiga.org, and it would add latency).
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