Voice calls not working over gtalk with empathy

Question

With Empathy Internet messaging in ubuntu11.04, written messages are working but I can't obtain voice call from my gmail account and with people using googtle talk. any help? thanks

Answer 1

According to the Empathy FAQ:

How can I test if audio/video is working?

Collabora is hosting an echo service: echo@test.collabora.co.uk . This is a jabber contact you can add to your roster. When you call it, anything you say will be echoed to you.

Does Empathy support audio and video chat with Google Talk?

Yes, you can have a audio or video chat on the Gtalk protocol with someone using Gmail's video chat feature, Empathy or Pidgin.

Note that if your contact is using Google Video, be sure he has the latest version of the plugin which can be downloaded from this page.

Which video codec do I need?

For calls between empathy and empathy, all you need is theora, which is installed by default on all distributions.

For calls between empathy and gtalk, you need h264 encoder. On ubuntu you can get it by installing gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse and gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg . To know if a codec is installed, you can use that command:

$ gst-inspect-0.10 | grep 264

Make sure you have encoder and decoder in the list. For h264 you'll have x264enc encoder for example. Similar command can be used for other codecs.

So have you troubleshot the application with the above steps mentioned and are still having the problem? If so, please add any necessary information to the post above and leave a comment on this answer (so that I can delete it off). However, if the problem has been solved due to this answer, please mark it accepted :)