Is there any chance to make audio and audio-video calls using telepathy?

Yes, we already have support for this in KDE Telepathy and it will be released in 0.4 (in two weeks). You can get it already if you know your way around git

mck182: do you mean native support or will I have to have Skype run in the background? For example it was possible in Nokia n900 (not sure about n9).

RRH wrote:mck182: do you mean native support or will I have to have Skype run in the background? For example it was possible in Nokia n900 (not sure about n9).

Native, of course. But that's only the "telepathy instead of skype" case. You are now able to make audio/video calls between two jabber accounts and in 0.5 we'll even have a nice SIP support. As for skype - that one still needs to be running, nothing we can do on our side about that.

As for skype - that one still needs to be running, nothing we can do on our side about that.

But can’t you use SkypeKit? Are there problems with licensing?

RRH wrote:

As for skype - that one still needs to be running, nothing we can do on our side about that.

But can’t you use SkypeKit? Are there problems with licensing?

Yes, their licence prevents us from distributing the resulting product and/or code. That's why there's no open-source skype client yet

How did Nokia solve it? Isn’t it possible to have a third-party non-free component? Could you elaborate on the licensing problem? The solution with Skype in the background is not really convincing.

Anyway I look forward to the stable version of KDE Telepathy. How long does it take you to finish it? I’ve been waiting and following information for 2, 3 years? It’s quite a long time. But better late than never.

RRH wrote:How did Nokia solve it?

Money

RRH wrote:Isn’t it possible to have a third-party non-free component? Could you elaborate on the licensing problem? The solution with Skype in the background is not really convincing.

I'll send George K. here, he knows much more about it than me

RRH wrote:Anyway I look forward to the stable version of KDE Telepathy. How long does it take you to finish it? I’ve been waiting and following information for 2, 3 years? It’s quite a long time. But better late than never.

We'll it's fairly usable right now. We have only minimum of crashes and we miss only some features. As for when we'll have 1.0 version - I don't dare to say.

RRH wrote:How did Nokia solve it? Isn’t it possible to have a third-party non-free component? Could you elaborate on the licensing problem? The solution with Skype in the background is not really convincing.

The skypekit program is oriented towards companies that wish to integrate skype in their products and requires a paid license to distribute. That's how Nokia solved it, with money (although to be exact, they don't actually use skypekit, they use something similar that used to exist before skypekit).

Telepathy's architecture allows having 3rd-party closed source components. In this case, the 3rd-party component is just a connection manager (telepathy-spirit in nokia's case) that communicates over d-bus with the open components.

We all know that the solution with the skype desktop client is not convincing at all, but it's not up to us. You can complain to skype if you want. Alternatively, you can convince your friends to switch to jabber/gtalk

OK, I see. Thanks for making it clear.

Alternatively, you can convince your friends to switch to jabber/gtalk

But what are real alternatives? SIP? Is Google voice chat reliable at all? Sorry, I haven’t tried any service with success except Skype. Once I tried with SIP in Ekiga but without a success.

Actually I use Jabber. Skype only from time to time. But even with sending/receiving files via Jabber it’s kind of a problem.
What do you recommend? Will be there a change for the better?

XMPP (jabber/gtalk) audio/video calls are the alternative. They are quite reliable for me, unlike file transfers which are indeed unreliable. SIP has a different concept, it is not so much contact-oriented, but it is also an option.

As regards XMPP: is any Jabber account capable of video/audio calls? Or it’s only Google’s one? For example I have an account on jabber.org as well as gmail one.

Jabber.org also can handle audio/video, tested myself As for other servers - I have personally no idea, but would be nice to look out for them and add them to some wiki.

@RRH - if you're about to look for those, please keep a list which we can put on a wiki, thanks!

Thanks mate! I’ll try out audio/video calls when OpenSuse has KDE Telepathy.

Afaik there are openSuse packages of kde-telepathy master, maintained by our resident tester, look here -- https://build.opensuse.org/project/pack ... -telepathy