Ekiga 4.0 has landed!

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

Three months separated the beta from the final 4.0 release for the popular open source Voice over IP softphone Ekiga, and it seems that everything is finally “at your service”.

The new major version that came out yesterday brings major improvements in the support of relative technologies, better functionality, increased stability and a major redesign of many UI elements.

Here is a list of the most important changes since version 3.2.7:

Major overhaul of the main window
Use gnome icons instead of ekiga’s own
Re-add back H264 and H263+ video plugins
New pulse audio plugin (in ptlib)
New audio codecs: SILK (used by skype), G.722.1 (aka Siren 7), G.722.2 (aka GSM-AMR Wide band)
Fix H.323 gatekeeper support
Call auto-answer
Support for handling multiple video streams (H.239)
Use spinner effect during ringing on the other party
Unregister accounts when quitting
Set presence to offline upon quitting
Faster startup by not getting canonical name of servers
Fixes for Contact field during registration:
Use two additional compatibility mode for some bogus registrars
Fix order of items in Contact field
Add tooltips to various windows and dialog boxes
Adjust defaults (show offline users, use picture-in-picture)
Jabber/XMPP and GStreamer fixes
[windows] Support mingw-w64 and its own headers for building

Ekiga 4 during a call

Ekiga is the best open source alternative to Skype, offering GNOME coherence, free audio and video calls, HD sound and DVD quality video, wide interoperability and so much more…

Currently, you won’t find a precompiled package for your distribution so your only choice is to download and compile Ekiga from source (note that you will also have to download and compile some other “latest” libraries). If you are not into the adventure, you should wait for your distribution to upgrade Ekiga in a few days or weeks.

Ekiga Website

Ekiga in GNOME Git

Eugen Dedu created a new branch:

I created a new branch for Ekiga 4.0.x and the tag EKIGA_4_0_0 for this release. Unfortunately, the recent history showed that we cannot keep up with gnome releases, so we called the new branch v4_0.

The branch is in string freeze

Ekiga Git @ http://git.gnome.org/browse/ekiga/