For a long time now, Mozilla has been a heavy user of the Vidyo video-conferencing system. Like Skype, it’s a “pretty much just works” solution where, sadly, the free software and open standards solutions don’t yet cut it in terms of usability. We hope WebRTC might change this. Anyway, in the mean time, we use it, which means that Mozilla staff have had to use a proprietary client, and those without a Vidyo login of their own have had to use a Flash applet. Ick. (I use a dedicated Android tablet for Vidyo, so I don’t have to install either.)
However, this sad situation may now have changed. In this bug, it seems that SIP and H.263/H.264 gateways have been enabled on our Vidyo setup, which should enable people to call in using standards-compliant free software clients. However, I can’t get video to work properly, using Linphone. Is there anyone out there in the Mozilla world who can read the bug and figure out how to do it?
Interesting enough though is core contributors cannot get Vidyo accounts so lacking a guest url we cannot search for rooms and readily join calls which sometimes move.
I can’t make everything better at once :-) However, this would mean you can dial into any Vidyo room you know the number of, and the numbers don’t change. So we could make a directory.
Finally!
Vidyo client on linux not work, but this is a new alternative.
For one-on-one calls, at least, I find WebRTC pretty good. http://apprtc.appspot.com/ is dead easy to use to set up a call.
roc: who is responsible for that site if I want to send feedback? It doesn’t seem to have obvious identifying info…