I'm a long-time Skype for Linux user; Linux is the only OS I have, and I rely on Skype. It's a great thing. I have also seen that video capability is coming to Skype. My question: are us Linux users also going to get video capability? I've been looking around for any kind of good Linux video conferencing software and I can't find it. I'm blown away by the quality of Skype for audio, and I know that if they release a video-capable product it's also going to be great. So I'm hoping.

thanks

[quote=LinuxUser]I'm a long-time Skype for Linux user; Linux is the only OS I have, and I rely on Skype. It's a great thing. I have also seen that video capability is coming to Skype. My question: are us Linux users also going to get video capability? I've been looking around for any kind of good Linux video conferencing software and I can't find it. I'm blown away by the quality of Skype for audio, and I know that if they release a video-capable product it's also going to be great. So I'm hoping.[/quote]
Did you already try gnomemeeting which includes video and sound (with support for Alsa sound)? Just that there is no fully compatible windows client...

It is our plan to get crossplatform video working with Skype. R&D on this is going on. As announced by Niklas Zennström in the news, video version of Skype is in the works.

Will there be a API support for wideo somehow? I don't know how I would do it, maybe X or QT supports embedding of some kind. I'm writing plugin for kopete and I would be unlucky if I had to show skype because of that, I'm trying to use kopete's UI - because of consistency, Skype just looks different and it can irritate users.

Thank you.

Anyhow, the API should offer some streaming of data, be it Video, Voice, Files or whatever the like!

Anyhow, if there was a skype-lib which we could build our UIs on it would be much better, we could have console-only skype (thus server-ready), gtk-purists would be happy and many more would see the long-avaited UI-features coming maybe quicker, or just implementing them during their leisuretime!

I'm glad to hear that a) the video version is in the works and b) it will be cross-platform. It's so cool of Skype Inc. to take the risk of writing a Linux platform. Even though the number of Linux Skype users might be small, it still matters because Linux users tend to be technology leaders or early adopters. For example, I started using Skype back in the 0.90 days (the first Linux release, whatever that was). I introduced it to a bunch of people, especially over-seas, and I know of about a dozens people who had never heard of Skype before, but started using it after I introduced it to them. So yeah, there might not be many Linux users but we do help get things adopted.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the video version, and running that on my favorite OS. Also, I'm so glad it's a Qt app! I know, Gnome users are people too, but Qt is my favorite, and a lot of desktop users are on Suse which is a KDE-oriented distro.

My only vote/desire for Skype is also that it comes with native ALSA sound. Come on, are there any distros out there that are not shipping with ALSA these days? ALSA is the built-in sound for Linux 2.6 and 2.6 has been the Linux kernel for over a year now.