[Telepathy] audio conference application

[Robert McQueen]

George Kiagiadakis wrote:
> 2009/8/12 nelson - <nelson1977 at gmail.com>:
>> Hi all! I'm starting the development of an audio conference
>> application. It will be a simple application that let's a master user
>> broadcast an audio file to the other clients, or to broadcast his mic
>> audio to the other users. All the users will be in the same room, it
>> will be a school lab. I check out telepathy, empathy, farsight2. i
>> will program in python. Some advice where can i start? I check out
>> farsight 2 examples and also
>>
>> http://people.collabora.co.uk/~davyd/telepathy-book/appendix.source-code.python_simple_presence.example.py.html
>>
>> Any other resources or interesting project where can i look for some
>> sort of inspiration?
>>
>> thanks in advance,
>>  Andrea
> 
> Afaik multi-user audio conference is not currently possible with
> telepathy. This is because no connection manager currently implements
> that and probably none will implement it with the current
> StreamedMediaChannel specification. If it was possible, you could just
> use empathy. So, you may need to do this only with farsight2 and
> implement all the protocol-related stuff on your own. As an
> alternative, you may help us improve the specification and implement
> multi-user conference support in some connection manager. I'm not sure
> what's easier and/or better.

This is correct. Farsight 2 supports multi-user RTP conferencing, and
we're working on a project called Muji (multi-user jingle) at the moment
in Collabora to signal multi-participant calls over XMPP. See
http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Muji and
http://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/muji.html for some more info. As part
of this work, we're changing Gabble and Salut to use the same new
GNIO-based XMPP library, Wocky
(http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=wocky.git;a=summary).

We will also be writing at least a new Media Signalling interface, and
possibly also a new Streamed Medic channel API if necessary, to support
signalling multi-user calls, and also because this is possibly the
oldest and most arcane and insane corner of the Telepathy API. We should
be able to have support for both the old and new inerfaces in
libtelepathy-farsight however, so the change should not be too disruptive.

As a short-term approach, you could look at using some kind of D-Bus
tubes-based API to send snippets of audio between users (like a push to
talk kinda thing) in a chat room.

Regards,
Rob

-- 
Robert McQueen                                 +44 7876 562 564
Director, Collabora Ltd.             http://www.collabora.co.uk