Re: [Ekiga-devel-list] Reorganizing things

[Peter Robinson <pbrobinson gmail com>]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 8:36 AM, Damien Sandras <dsandras seconix com> wrote:
> Le mercredi 02 septembre 2009 à 10:15 +0200, yannick a écrit :
>> >>From a Fedora point of view the two "bugs" I see on a regular basis
>> > are "Audio Problems" (will be fixed mostly by a Pulse Audio plugin set
>> > as the default) and Network issues which are mostly Firewall and NAT
>> > based. I think support for upnp would possibly fix most of those
>> > issues for the average user. The would be the most useful features
>> > from my point of view and the later would probably also help the issue
>> > with ekiga.net "not working" mentioned elsewhere.
>> >
>>
>> I see pulse audio as a good thing for the Linux audio stack; it provide
>> a unified test case of the major features and my hope is to see it
>> improve the situation at the end. (and IMHO it really needs improvements...)
>
> The problem is that it is not designed for VoIP applications: it adds
> latency.
>
>> The network issue is also a complex matter. I agree upnp will improve
>> the situation too. Still it will not be enough for some people. The
>
> In Belgium, I've never seen a router supporting upnp...

Interesting. I believe from friends that some devices like the PS3
require upnp to work well. I don't have one to verify. The router I
have happens to work very well because it understands SIP and deals
with the forwarding. I have a fairly dumb SIP handset and I can
send/receive calls with it using no special config at all.

>> software we compete with here (skype) is full of workarounds for
>> hardware/network config *hostile* to VoIP. As people with software which
>> do not work are always louder than people where it just work, the
>> situation will still harm ekiga reputation. Beside, the security topic
>> here is quite important and very complex, and this is something skype
>> deals with obscurity. Quite frankly, I doubt if the skype protocol was
>> open, it will be considered as secure... I've started to work on the
>> topic, i.e. how to deal with hardware/setup hostile to VoIP. I've hope
>> to publish a white paper in the coming months (I was full of hope to
>> publish this for the end of august, but I was then busy with user
>> support, bug triaging, packages, etc.). I do not see a good fix for that
>> in the short term. Any help is welcome.
>
> I plan to detect that at some point, and redirect people through a
> proxy. However, I'm not sure about the load and bandwidth in that case.

Not sure how well that would work in a corporate environment and what
they would think of that sort of config.

As a side note I've just discovered the libnice library [1] that
implements "IETF's draft Interactice Connectivity Establishment
standard (ICE)", a standard that I've never heard of but the telepathy
IM stack is using it. I only discovered it because I had to recompile
it in Fedora as part of a group of packages I maintain.

Peter

[1] http://nice.freedesktop.org/wiki/