I have been silent on my blog during the last two years. There are several reasons to this. I went through a serie of emotionally hard to live events during which I had no time left for Ekiga. I guess it happens to all Free Software authors who are developing during their spare time.

Things are getting better now. I have moved into a new house 2 years ago. I also met Claire a few months after I separated from Jonita and I am finally getting prepared to become a father!

I decided to dedicate some spare time to the Ekiga project again. During the time I was not coding, a few people like Eugen Dedu, Julien Puydt, Yannick Defais, and a few others have made their best to keep the project alive.

A few interviews

Two interviews have been published a while ago.

The first interview has been published by Josette on her Josetteorama blog.
The second interview has been published by Billy Toulas on OSArena. It is available both in English and in Greek.

Ekiga 4.00

Work has started on Ekiga 4.00 a few weeks ago. The release should be ready around March when we have done enough testing.

Stay tuned for more information about this exciting new release!

Please note that I started the development of Ekiga 9 years ago.

Here is the list of changes :

• Added support for the G.722 audio codec: G.722 is a 16 kHz wideband audio codec advertised as HD Voice by the famous Polycom. It is a great boost in quality and interoperability.
• Added support for the CELT ultral-low delay audio codec: CELT delivers high quality audio at 32 kHz or 48 kHz, allowing to transmit music in high quality, with low delay and low bitrate.
• Added support for SIP dialog-info notifications: they allow displaying notifications of incoming calls in the roster. With software like kamailio or Asterisk, it allows being informed of incoming calls reaching your colleagues.
• Largely improved LDAP support: the OpenLDAP guys contributed several patches to provide state-of-the-art LDAP support in the Ekiga address book. The new code even supports authentication.
• Added support to disable STUN detection: some routers do not need it anymore as they implement NAT traversal for SIP.
• Killed the gconf_test_age test: when GConf was released, Ekiga was among the first to adopt it. That annoying ‘gconf error’ was a relique of those early times.
• More efficient memory handling using gmref_ptr.
• Better handling of multiple network interfaces with dynamic addition and removal.
• libgnome is not required anymore when using GTK+ 2.14.
• Many code cleanups, new GObjects, …

The Ekiga developers team is also working on interesting new features that should be available after the 3.2 release :

• XCAP support & Resource List support: It allows storing the contacts list on the Ekiga.net server.
• GStreamer audio and video capture support.

Stay tuned for more news!

Thanks to all contributors and welcome to Eugen Dedu, our new release manager!

Today, we upgraded Ekiga.net, and that’s a lot of work !

Ekiga.net is now running Kamailio as frontend (recently renamed to SIP Router due to the merge between Kamailio and the old SIP Express Router project)
and Asterisk 1.4.

Among others, it allows to run the echo test with codecs like H.264, and better SIP presence support.

The old WEB interface has been replaced by a more intuitive one thanks to
Yannick Defais. The look and feel is now similar to the one you can see on the
brother ekiga.org website.

I would also like to thank Jan Schampera who helps me daily maintaining
ekiga.net and who helped a lot for the upgrade.

You can enjoy to the new infrastructure daily by signing up for an account at
http://www.ekiga.net.

Ekiga 3.00 is available for download at the usual location. More packages will be added later.

A complete revamping of Ekiga.net and its features is on its way.

Here is a summary of the new features. Only major features are listed here.

Graphical User Interface

• New user interface with a buddy list
• Accelerated video display (Unix: XVideo, Windows: DirectDraw)
• Nice incoming call notifications
• Easier configuration assistant
• New quality meter in the status bar
• Buddy list with extended status information
• Displays network neighbours in the buddy list
• Better keyboard shortcuts
• Automatic account completion in the URL bar
• New chat window
• New address book supporting Evolution contacts, LDAP contacts and more
• New account window allowing easier account creation
• New call panel

Codecs

• H.263+
• H.264
• THEORA
• MPEG4
• Framerate up to 30 FPS
• Resolutions (up to 704×576) (at best it is DVD quality)
• Audio and video codecs as plugins
• Support for Intel IPP codecs

SIP Support

• SIP/SIMPLE presence support
• Line monitoring with software like Asterisk
• Custom presence message support
• Dynamic detection of network interfaces
• Register/unregister accounts on interfaces going up and down
• Better NAT traversal
• SIP requests originated from a unique port
• Support for several network interfaces at the same time (e.g. VPN and normal network)
• Full SIP capabilties exchange for codecs (unique in the Open Source world)
• SIP INFO DTMF support
• Possibility to send SMS using the Ekiga Call Out account
• Many compliance fixes

Hotplug Support

• Hotplug support for audio and video devices (even when being in a call)
• Hotplug support for network interfaces

For Developers and Packagers

• Brand new Ekiga Engine, fully separated from the GUI and reusable in other projects
• Reworked WIN32 build
• Better autoconf support for OPAL

Both events were fantastic and the talk about Ekiga 3.00 drew much attention from the audience, with interesting questions and general enthousiasm.

I would like to thank the organizers of both events.

You can find both talks hereunder. The GUADEC talk contains more information about the new Ekiga Engine introduced for Ekiga 3.00 :

• RMLL Talk
• GUADEC Talk

Right after the RMLL, I will be flying back from Mont-de-Marsan to Belgium on Friday.

On Saturday, I’ll take the plane to Istanbul for GUADEC.

I will present Ekiga 3.00 to both events : what’s new, what’s old, what’s to expect.

I have just committed a large piece of missing code in the Ekiga engine.

See you there !

However, I’m not sure to have enough spare time (yes, I’m not paid to work on Ekiga) to finish everything at perfection for the next release of GNOME. Do you want to join forces ?

Thank you to Kilian for having maintained them during all those years…

Check them out:
http://snapshots.ekiga.net.

It includes Debian Unstable (i386 and amd64) and Ubuntu Hardy and Gutsy
(i386 and amd64).

Those packages feature the presence indicator, new and advanced video
codecs, a roster like you can find in most Instant Messenger clients, a
quality indicator, an easier setup and many other things.

Last but not least, we have hidden many bugs to hunt here and there!
Please, be kind enough to help us test and improve the software.

My talk went great, you can download it by following this link.

I think it was successful, there were many people and I could demonstrate the new features of Ekiga 3.00 by calling Jonita through our VPN connection.

People could see the presence feature in Ekiga, as well as the video codecs improvements.

I liked Berlin very much, it seems to be a very enjoyable town.

I spent most of my time with Anne and Vincent.

I would like to thank Anne again for organizing the GNOME track, and of course the GNOME foundation for sponsoring the travel.

I’ll be giving a talk at the event this Saturday.

If you want to see more about Ekiga 3.00, feel free to join in Saal Paris.

I will present Ekiga in general, SIP, Ekiga 3.00 and what we can expect from the future. I also hope there will be no problem with the VPN connection at the office to do a short demo of Ekiga used with Asterisk.