Support voice/video/calling through ORTC/webrtc

[DrYak]

ORTC, Microsoft "Not-Invented-Here syndrome" of WebRTC, is finally being released in their Edge browser.

source: http://blogs.skype.com/2015/09/18/skype-for-web-and-skype-for-outlook-com-update/

So, any chance of eventually having working calls into skypeweb ? Is there someone with the necessary skillset to start investigating ?

[EionRobb]

There's definitely a chance. The tricky bit will be to see how nicely it plays with gstreamer's webrtc plugin. Voice/video is a bit of a non-trivial mess to work with, but definitely worth attempting.

[EionRobb]

Just as a bit of an update, had another look into this, but they still don't have it working in Edge, Chrome or Firefox (even if you enable all the hidden settings)

[Silent-Hunter]

Thank you for considering this. I can imagine it will be a lot of work, but well worth it in my opinion.

[SapphirusBeryl]

It seems like WebRTC support has been implemented for Microsoft Edge. Also, a user-agent spoofer seems to make it functional in Firefox.

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/04/15/preview-plugin-free-skype-video-calling-in-microsoft-edge
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/05/simple-hack-to-use-skype-web-linux

[EionRobb]

Neat :)

Getting pretty close to getting it working in Hangouts then I'll look at bringing that through for Skype

[SapphirusBeryl]

Thank you for the prompt response. I will be looking forward to further developments.

[pchome]

Up ;)
Skype Releases Brand New Linux Client Making Use Of WebRTC

[sirus20x6]

it's been a year. has there been any work on getting voice calls working now that skype uses webrtc?

[zaggynl]

pidgin-sipe allows video/voice on skype for business, could this be used for skype4pidgin/skypeweb?

[dequis]

No. Completely different protocol

[DrYak]

"Skype for Business" and "Skype" only share their name.

"Skype for Business" is pretty much standard enterprise VoIP solution running the standard SIP protocol. It's a derivative of Microsoft Lync, which in turn is the descendant of Microsoft Netmeeting.
The standard just switched from the older telecom standard (H323) to the slightly more recent IETF standard (SIP).

"Skype" is an entirely different and completely different protocol which began its life as a derivative of the distributed network and hole-punching/NAT-circumvention "Fasttrack" protocol used by Kazaa. (but used for VoIP instead of file sharing).
Since then it has progressively evolved to a centralised protocol, and more recently Microsoft has begun to make a web-app implementation (web.skype.com) which is what EionRobb's nice plugin uses (kudos for the great work !), and since very recently is what Microsoft is slowly shifting to for their Linux implementation (the old Linux app was a port of Skype for Windows 4.x using Qt. The upcoming app that is currently in beta is basically the web-app wrapped together with a webkit engine).

This latest web-app uses "ORTC" as a protocol for voice, which Microsoft's own weird take on the WebRTC standard that every other browser uses.
This is a reason why at some point of time you needed a plugin on non microsoft browsers to get call in Web Skype working.
Since then I've read there have been effort to bring things a little bit closer to work (can't remember if it is use ORTC to WebRTC wrappers...)

As EionRobb's plugin runs on WebSkype anyway and the various flavours of RTC are getting supported in standard toolkits, that's where the future of this plugin resides regarding calls.

[protomors]

This latest web-app uses "ORTC" as a protocol for voice, which Microsoft's own weird take on the WebRTC standard that every other browser uses.
This is a reason why at some point of time you needed a plugin on non microsoft browsers to get call in Web Skype working.

At first calls at web.skype.com really worked only in Microsoft browsers. But now I can successfully make calls (even videocalls) using chromium on linux. So either web version of skype switched to WebRTC or chrome implemented ORTC. I don't know the details, but first option looks more likely. Is is worth investigating.

[fishman]

Figured I'd chime in now. WebRTC chat now works in chrome in linux. I also managed to get it to connect in Firefox by setting the user agent to chrome. There is no voice, according to the chrome dump they're the using G722 codec. It looks to me like it might not work in firefox because of that. There is a Firefox issue that claims the codec wasn't enabled properly, but fix afterwards. I couldn't find any servers to test the codec with.

Keep in mind that the new skypepreview is really just an electron app. If there any hints on how to add WebRTC to pidgin vv I could probably implement it myself.

[fishman]

Looks like there is a sample implementation here https://github.com/EricssonResearch/openwebrtc/blob/master/tests/test_client.c

[davidhealey]

Any news on this?

[EionRobb]

@davidhealey actually, there kind of is, yeah :)

We've just managed to (in the last week) get voice calls working on Hangouts, which also uses webrtc, so now we're just playing around to see if it's possible to add video support and then we'll give it a go with Skype :)

[davidhealey]

:D Excellent, then I'll be able to drop crappy Skype entirely!

[DrYak]

there's no "i love you!" reaction emoji, but that's about how much enthusiastic I feel about this news.

[davidhealey]

So is voice support still a possibility?

[Sawiq]

Bump. Also waiting for this feature :) Currently skype works in google chrome, so my guess is, they moved to regular WebRTC protocol. GStreamer 1.14 handles it natively.

I would love to see some non-electron replacement for native apps.