Re: Skype access cancelled for Debian versions before 7
Bret Busby <bret.busby@gmail.com> writes:
> On 03/08/2014, Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> wrote:
>> On 3/08/2014 4:39 AM, Brian wrote:
>>> On Sun 03 Aug 2014 at 01:29:57 +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
>>> There is no substitute for Skype (either the software or the service)
>>> whether it be open or closed source,
>>
>> What about Google Hangouts? That might be a reasonable substitute....
>
> Google? That is even more sinister than the NSA, isn't it? The NSA
> doesn't drive around suburbia, filming everyone in their yards.
(snip)
At least that you've noticed. (-: A persistently irritating problem with
both Skype and Google Hangouts, at least for me, is that they have
consistently worked far better and more reliably than any of the
open-source alternatives! However, Skype don't even seem to bother
offering amd64 packages so, as with acroread, I run it from a 32-bit
chroot -- I thus guess that their interest in supporting Linux is
minimal. (I am also irritated with how Google's package sneakily adds
its own /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ file.)
I put some effort into getting Linphone and Jitsi working, and over
several years now Ekiga -- including compiling patched versions,
capturing and sharing so many debug logs, trying different combinations
of codecs, etc. -- and, while the Ekiga developers are consistently
communicative and helpful, I never managed to get to a point where I
could make a call with any confidence that we would have audio and video
going in both directions for as long as we wanted to talk. It's been
both surprising and frustrating as I don't see technically why we
shouldn't be able to get it to work better: the networks and NAT
traversal seem otherwise reliable when I test the same ports with nc and
am doing other stuff remotely with those systems. In some cases I can
actually ssh into the machines of the people I would like to call, and
sudo -- I've caught myself wondering if I could just construct some
pipeline of commands to capture, encode, forward and play audio and
video streams, with the help of mplayer or whatever, allowing a poor
man's version of open-source videotelephony without actually having to
try to get any of the actual videotelephone software working well.
-- Mark
Reply to: