video calls fail frequently

[Ken VanDine]

Binary package hint: empathy

Video calls seem to mostly work sometimes. This is not the user experience we want subject to the ubuntu users. It does seem to mostly work, but periodically crashes and frequently fails to connect.

Just tested this with empathy 2.28.0-0ubuntu1, libtelepathy-farsight0 0.0.11-2 using the gabble backend.

We need to look into making this work better or perhaps disabling video call support in empathy.

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

In karmic, we are having trouble with video calls. After the telepathy-farsight update to 0.0.11-2 we are having more success, but currently when placing video calls we get just a black screen for the remote video. The local video preview is displaying video and audio seems fine.

telepathy-mission-control-5 5.3.1-1
telepathy-gabble 0.8.3-1
libtelepathy-farsight0 0.0.11-2
libgstfarsight0.10-0 0.0.15-1ubuntu1

I am attaching logs for both gabble and empathy, let me know if there is other specific information that would be useful.

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

Created an attachment (id=29804)
empathy log

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

Created an attachment (id=29805)
gabble bug

[Guillaume-desmottes (guillaume-desmottes)]

Error seems to be:

(empathy:14075): tp-fs-WARNING **: stream 2 0xa90ea08 (video) _tf_stream_bus_message: error (connection-failed (108)): Could not establish connection : Could not establish connection on the RTP component
tp-fs-Message: tf_stream_error: stream error errorno=3 error=Could not establish connection

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

While this should be tackled soon, since fixing it might not be trivial, it isn't a bug which should block the beta release.

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

Created an attachment (id=29806)
Failed video with tedg (black screen)

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

Created an attachment (id=29807)
gabble log for failed video with tedg (black screen)

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

Launchpad bug for tracking this in ubuntu is https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/empathy/+bug/434878

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

Created an attachment (id=29811)
kenvandine's side of the conversation with pitti (empathy)

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

Created an attachment (id=29812)
kenvandine's side of the conversation with pitti (gabble)

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

Created an attachment (id=29813)
pitti's side of the conversation with kenvandine (empathy)

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

Created an attachment (id=29814)
pitti's side of the conversation with kenvandine (gabble)

[Brian Curtis (bcurtiswx)]

Since Audio/Video chat is already a huge hit around the world in its
ability to allow two people from anywhere in the world to talk and see
each other. I imagine if you can't get this done for Karmic, that the
entire focus around 10.04 should be making audio/video chat compatible
on all OS's. I will probably discuss this more in my next blog entry
in the planet.

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

upstream bug https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24118

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

So, Ken and I tested this. We both killed telepathy daemons and empathy and started from a clean slate. Ken could see my video, but I just could see a black screen. Ken asked me to upload gabble and empathy debug logs here.

When we tried this earlier, this was erratic: sometimes we both just got black video, once it worked for both of us, sometimes we both got video and one direction didn't get audio, etc.

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

These are my logs for the same conversation with Martin.

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

I am starting to suspect this isn't really a bug in telepathy, but in using google hosted domains for jabber.

I did a test jabber.org to jabber.org account and it worked very well. It seems to work fine too testing with overriding the server for the google hosted account.

Is there any indication in those logs that this could be a problem negotiating the connection and SRV records?

[Rick Spencer (rick-rickspencer3)]

It's past the point of being good enough to ship for karmic, though would be ideal to get some more robustness. In any case, we'll follow up in Lucid.

[Andreas Proschofsky (suka-gentoo)]

Just wanted to point out, that this works perfectly fine in the Fedora 12 Beta, while with Ubuntu 9.10 I get the exact same behaviour as described in Comment #4 . So I guess the solution could be somewhere over there, might be that they seem to use some more recent stable packages of the telepathy stuff...

[Khairul Aizat Kamarudzzaman (fenris)]

just work for me in empathy 2.29.92 lucid ... but its only work for a while .. now i cant receive the video call anymore .. trying the latest from ppa also doesnt work with me ..

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

Yeah, it has gotten much better now in Lucid (empathy 2.29.x) and there is more info displayed when calls fail. Also failed calls don't seem to crash empathy anymore, so huge improvement. But it still could be better.

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

marking this fixed as google talk/jabber video call support is very much stable in Lucid.

[Olivier-crete-x (olivier-crete-x)]

It's using google's relay server, but iut shoudl work.

Can you do a log while running empathy with NICE_DEBUG=all (or empathy-av if you're using 2.32)

[Olivier-crete-x (olivier-crete-x)]

This is all old code.. I'm sure new versions have new bugs.