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Does anyone know how to make audio and video calls work with Pidgin (for those protocols that support it)?

Video is supposed to work on MSN, and audio is supposed to work on Google Talk, but whatever I try the Media->Audio Call and Media->Video Call menu options are always greyed out. My microphone and webcam are plugged in and work (and Empathy's video preferences can see them), so I know it's not a hadware problem; I have installed libgstfarsight0.10-0 and gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad; but I still can't make pidgin do audio calls.

This is with Pidgin 2.7.3 and Maverick.

Any ideas?

2 Answers 2

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According to the Pidgin voice and video trac not much work has been done on MSN. XMPP (and Google Talk) should work.

According to here you need both gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly and gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg.

Why is there a greyed-out option? As a placeholder. Yes, farsight has MSN Webcam support but according to the imfreedom wiki "is a unidirectional Video only conversation".

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    First of all it would make very little sense to add a menu entry for a feature that does not exist, even if the entry is grayed out all the time. Second of all I've successfully used video-chat over jabber with pidgin, so pidgin definitely supports it.
    – sepp2k
    Oct 24, 2010 at 16:16
  • I've used audio calls with it fine, Never had the need to use video calls though...
    – Will
    Oct 24, 2010 at 16:31
  • The menu system is common for all protocols. It makes less sense to change the conversation window for every protocol rather than simply disabling entries for unsupported features.
    – Jonathon
    Oct 24, 2010 at 17:04
  • XMPP should work, but doesn't. Do you have any suggestions as to why it doesn't work? Oct 24, 2010 at 17:12
  • Do you have gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly and gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg installed?
    – Jonathon
    Oct 24, 2010 at 17:18
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I'm posting this, because this question came up, when I was searching to find the same solution, but with Ubuntu 14.04LTS. Now that I have said solution, I'm keen to make it easy for others to find.

See Lync Attendee meetings on ubuntu? for my comments on using sipe-collab ppa, to allow video, audio and desktop sharing calls with Lync, on Pidgin

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