Long time ago (end of 2006) I developed a patch to use your webcam with the Kopete Jabber plugin. I used the MSN webcam code 'as it' and wrapped it into XMPP XML. [1]

Here is the patch against Kopete 0.12 (in KDE 3.5) for those who want it: http://bepointbe.be/files/jabber_webcam.diff

Anyway, it has several negative issue

  • This is not a XMPP standard, so it only work with person who have applied the same patch.
  • It would be difficult for other client to include it (It was easy in Kopete because Kopete has an MSN implementation).
  • Because of that I do not plan to include it in any official release.
  • It doesn't use jingle, this is totally unrelated.

The only positive issue of this protocol is that it would be easy to implement it in the MSN gateway. But this has no real interest since only Kopete support it, and Kopete support MSN natively

It could also make happy linuxers that want to use their webcam without using the evil MSN. But they could also use other free conferencing software such as Ekiga.

Notes

[1] Microsoft probably did the same anyway: they wrapped an existing webcam protocol into the MSN one.