Video conferencing and webcams on Netbsd

Christian Koch

2014-05-19 18:05:47 UTC

Hi Ottavio,

Is there any video conferencing (client) software that works on
Netbsd? Anything, for example, that can connect to Skype? (I know the
Skype client exists but I guess it doesn't support video).

I've never been able to get packages which explicitly support video conferencing
to actually work. Pidgin, WebRTC, you name it. However, I have been able to roll
my own (so to speak) with all sorts of hacks, but that's kinda my "thing,"
mucking about with audio and video.

Christian,
if it's no too late for this topic, can you expand this bit about your
hacks for video conferencing?

I haven't been able to get anything truly practical to work at all. I've just
been messing around. It's all tinkering.

I was able to get a NTSC DV stream with the help of fwctl(8) and pipe it over a
network with netcat, while monitoring it locally with tee(1) and MPlayer. That's
probably the coolest thing. Ditto for audio with audiorecord(1). It's also not
terribly difficult to stream Vorbis and Theora data with VLC or FFmpeg. So if
two people get it to work then you can talk to each other. But this isn't really
video conferencing, it's more like... ad-hoc video streaming?

My Sony Vaio has a USB webcam built inside, but I've never been able to get it
to work on NetBSD. As far as I can tell it's no different than a pseye(4) (it's
all Sony, right?) but whatever, that doesn't actually bother me too much.

And for the record, Icecast works perfectly for me. However, Mumble would be
better for actually talking to people. The last time I tried, which I suppose
was a long time ago, the wip/mumble and wip/umurmur packages couldn't build on
my machine.

So yeah, like I said, nothing really practical at all. I'm just abusing NetBSD
like a laboratory ;)

-Christian