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Until now, videoconferencing has lived in dedicated applications. We've had instant messengers with VoIP, softphones, but they don't integrate into the everyday workflow. Farstream, the next generation of Farsight, the GStreamer based VoIP and videoconferencing framework not only provides media handling to communication applications such as Empathy, Pidgin, aMSN and the Nokia Internet Tablets, but can also be used to integrate videoconferencing into everyday applications.

Farstream provides a common API over the various VoIP media handling protocols, plugins already exist for the RTP standard and the MSN webcam system. The RTP plugin is fully-featured and includes dynamic codec negotiation and switching, multi-party conferencing, lip synchronization, confort noise, DTMF and multiple pluggable transports (ICE, multicast and unicast UDP). Farstream can also be integrated into the Telepathy framework to provide a complete solution with various signalling protocols, including SIP, XMPP and MSN. Using this powerful combination, its then easy to integrate videoconferencing into an application.

I will give a brief introduction to Farstream and Telepathy and how they integrate. I will then show how to integrate videoconferencing features into an application such as a non-linear sound editor. I will also demonstrate how easy it is for application developers to integrate such features into their applications and how useful it can be for users.