Audio Video calling in Conversations

I use Conversations for XMPP, and yesterday a friend told me that in the latest version of Conversations, it’s now possible to have an audio/video call. Once upon a time, FOSS audio/video calling over XMPP was like a pipe dream, being able to talk to one’s Google Talk contacts from a FOSS platform. Sometime in 2008-2010, Google released Jingle XEPs which they had implemented for VoIP in their client, along with the reference implementation in form of libjingle library.

I remembered spending days trying to get their client working, to be able to hear voices of the friends from the other side, even using just a CLI program, not even a curses UI. A solution like that was much needed in those times. SIP was okay, but it was not XMPP. And then sometime later, when telepathy was released, I tried telepathy, and Empathy which were still buggy. I haven’t had much success in all of those attempts, but they were fun, bonding, and learning times.

Now, as I reminisce about those times, I haven’t heard from those friends in a while, and some of them are gone forever, and then Google also shutdown XMPP federation, but today after configuring ejabberd, it worked flawlessly for me. Great times for FOSS! :)