TheRealTimeWeb.com: Google Adds Free Voice and Video Chat to Gmail

Google Adds Free Voice and Video Chat to Gmail

Posted by Stefan Richter in General | 7 Comments

Google have announced a new feature for Gmail (Google Talk to be exact): free voice and video chat.
The plu-gin (which according to PC World) is a proprietary, non-Flash based system and supports Chrome, Firefox 2.0+, Internet Explorer 7.0, and Safari 3.0. The technology apparently comes from a company called Marratech which Google acquired last year.

While the encoding is obviously handled by a proprietary plug-in, it was reported that the client to view the video is in fact Flash. This is interesting, since it would suggest RTMP being used as the protocol. The Google blog however mentions only XMPP, RTP and H.264 as the technologies used... Hmm interesting. I'm sure some folks will dig deeper and report back with their findings. I have installed the plug-in but got nobody to call since I never use Google Talk. Help, I need friends.

Footnote: US folks can order some very good webcams with fairly big discounts.

Tweet Follow @stefanrichter
Posted on November 12, 2008 at 9:50 PM. 3092 views. 7 comments. Print

TweetBacks

Comments

[Add Comment] [Subscribe to Comments]

#1 by tino Klumpen on 11/12/08 - 10:20 PM

try me
#2 by Juan Delgado on 11/12/08 - 10:23 PM

You can try me too. I'm interested as well.
#3 by Brad on 11/13/08 - 6:17 PM

Just as a FYI:

I have the QC Pro for Notebooks they have listed and it's a pretty decent little camera and has never given me any problems.
#4 by Andy on 11/14/08 - 3:10 PM

I just bought a Logitech QC Pro 9000, the image quality is crazy good.
I'm really interested in seeing the image quality of the Google/Vidyo product in a low to medium bandwidth environment (200-500kbps)
#5 by jason martell on 11/15/08 - 1:01 AM

Very Cool!
#6 by Erki Esken on 11/17/08 - 11:03 AM

It looks like the plugin does all audio and video capturing, processing and transport, and then exposes these streams to Gmail Flash UI as a simple progressive video download. They seem to start a local http server for this, so they haven't implemented rtmp protocol on their own, afaik.
#7 by Bryan Bartow on 11/17/08 - 4:23 PM

When going full screen using the new chat, a bezel displaying a message telling the user to use the Esc key to exit full screen is displayed. As far as I can tell, this is exactly the same bezel as Flash 9+ shows when changing to full screen.