The Farstream A/V Conferencing Framework

Farsight, the GStreamer-based audio/video conferencing framework that's used by MeeGo, Pidgin, Empathy, aMSN, and former Nokia phones is now known as the Farstream project.

Farsight has been in development for the past half-decade (most recently as "Farsight 2") and its development has been sponsored by Collabora, but last week the project was renamed to Farstream.

Plans to rename the project go back at least two years, but last week the changes were made to the Git repository, FreeDesktop.org Wiki, mailing list, and other areas. Worth noting is that along with the mass rename, there were a lot of commits pushed to the Farstream repository that day by Olivier Crête. It also appears that more of the project's infrastructure has moved from SourceForge to FreeDesktop.org.

The Farstream project is described as "an effort to create a framework to deal with all known audio/video conferencing protocols. On one side it offers a generic API that makes it possible to write plugins for different streaming protocols, on the other side it offers an API for clients to use those plugins." As said earlier, Farsight/Farstream is used by MeeGo, former Nokia Maemo phones, Pidgin, and other open-source projects. Farstream is part of GNOME's Telepathy framework and provides what is now known as the Telepathy-Farstream library. This GStreamer-using Collabora-sponsored project also implements the Jingle XMPP protocol.

For those wishing to find more information, visit the FreeDesktop.org Wiki page.