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First Beta Release of Ekiga 2.00

Submitted by Anonymous George on Thu, 2006-01-19 04:19. Ekiga
Ekiga

After more than one year of active development, GnomeMeeting has reborn on the form of Ekiga.

Ekiga is a SIP and H.323 application, supporting audio and video, and is the successor of GnomeMeeting.
The first BETA release is available on http://www.ekiga.org.

Among the features, you can find:

* Call Forwarding on busy, no answer, always (SIP and H.323)
* Call Transfer (SIP and H.323)
* Call Hold (SIP and H.323)
* DTMFs support (SIP and H.323)
* Basic Instant Messaging (SIP)
* Text Chat (SIP and H.323)
* Possibility to register registrars (SIP) and to gatekeepers (H.323)
* Possibility to use an outbound proxy (SIP) or a gateway (H.323)
* Message Waiting Indications (SIP)
* Audio AND Video (SIP and H.323)
* STUN support (SIP and H.323)
* DTMFs support
* LDAP support

Among the new features, you can find:

* Improved audio quality using Wideband codecs (16 kHz)
* Echo Cancellation
* Easier NAT traversal
* Largely improved user interface
* Improved Video4Linux2 support

And do not forget our ekiga.net SIP platform:

* Provides SIP addresses to everyone, conference rooms, echo tests, and white pages. This platform is sponsorised by http://www.ovh.com.

another vote

Submitted by Anonymous George on Wed, 2006-01-25 00:48.

Wow, this trollfest has been going on longer than most. Just have to add my vote for Rhythmbox "working just fine." The UI is still a bit clunky, but doesn't crash on me (and yes I have mp3s, oggs, wavs, and flacs in my library). Importing the library takes longer than it should, and it sometimes skips a little between songs. It might not be noticeable on a faster machine, but it is definitely apparent on my 800 MHz Athlon. These are just polish issues, though.

Totem (w/ GStreamer backend), is ok. It works fine playing video files. It works fine most of the time playing dvds, but occasionally can't for some reason (not a region coding issue, vlc handles it fine). Performance is the big problem. The UI is very sluggish and doesn't refresh properly in fullscreen mode. The interactive menus on dvds don't always respond well. Sometimes it forgets to disable the xscreensaver in fullscreen mode too. All in all, it works ok, but it could be better (most importantly, faster).

* TopDown, if you are actually interested in solving your problems and not just trolling, there are a lot of things going on that can screw things up. I haven't used Fedora or Suse, but I was using Ubuntu and the multimedia stuff was really a mess. I rebuilt my machine with Debian unstable and everything works like a charm. So even closely related distros can be different wrt multimedia. A few suggestions: make sure you are using alsasink as the preferred output device, use an up-to-date kernel (I recommend 2.6.15), don't use esd and explicitly disable it in your sound preferences (if it binds to /dev/dsp it will screw everything up), use the latest versions of hal/dbus/udev/etc....

Oh, and including drm support does not mean you have to use drm. It just means you CAN use drm if you have/want to. You won't be forced to drm your ripped music or anything like that if that is what you are afraid of. If you really care about free software, use pure Debian (w/o the non-free section). They won't distibute any signed, unrecompilable binaries or binary only modules. You can continue to not support drm'd music by not buying it and not having it on your machine. A drm module included with gstreamer won't prevent this.

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