Current developments and roadmap

Today linphone is facing one major problem: its graphical interface. Indeed it is old: it hasn't changed a lot since the beginning of the project. It is gui generated using the glade-2 tool, which is now deprecated, no longer maintained and even no longer distributed in recent distros. This is the reason why the linphone's interface hasn't changed at all since more than one year, despite a lot of enhancements were made on the video processing plane (new codecs, resizing of window, better control of bandwidth usage).

The replacement for the old glade-2 tool is named glade-3, but don't be confused by the name: it 's indeed a very different tool, based on a very different concept: instead of generating source code for the interface, it just generates a xml file to be interpreted by libglade (or later by libgtk itself) at runtime. There is no doubt that this concept is much powerful, and has drastic effects in terms of ease of programming and code maintainance.

But it requires the total rewriting of the glue between the buttons of the linphone engine. Anyway as the interface is old and not very user-friendly by some aspects, it was a good idea to restart a new graphical interface.

As of today the cvs tree of linphone holds a new directory "gtk-glade" containing the code and xml files of a new interface, called "linphone-3". CVS users can already try it despite there are still lots of missing features.

It is expected that this new interface also runs on windows, so that we'll have a unique frontend for both OS.

On the media processing side, the cvs HEAD has a new V4Lv2 backend that normally fixes various problems seen with the linux-uvc driver: back screen, protocol error, blinking images, ffmpeg errors...

Also a new video plugin will be released with next version: a H264 video encoder/decoder plugin based on the x264 project and ffmpeg of course. The few tests I've made show a really amazing quality improvement compared to older codecs.