Temporary solution for Gmail voice and video chat on Linux

If you're dying to try out Gmail voice and video chat on Linux right now, here's a temporary solution that may work for you while we finish the official Linux version. This clever hack allows the voice functionality of the Google Talk Plugin to work on Linux via the Wine shim layer.

Also, responding to some of the comments on the 1.0.10 post:

• We expect to support ALSA and PulseAudio.
• The packetization to be used for H.264/SVC will be that specified in http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-avt-rtp-svc-18.txt, which is currently on its way to becoming a RFC.

Cool testimonial for Gmail video chat

Saw this on YouTube today. It's great to see people having fun with our product.

Tweet your Gmail video chat experiences!

Searching Twitter for "Gmail video chat" or "Google video chat" has been a great way for us to see how people are using the service. Some great recent tweets:

"set up gmail video chat for my parents for while i'm away. they're so impressed that i can click a series of buttons and magically appear." (link)

"Google video chat is pretty awesome in terms of a free service. I am left wondering why Google is not promoting it more aggressively." (link)

"Just discovered Gmail's "Archive" feature, along with a whole slew of things I didn't know existed. Best video chat ever." (link)

Our team keeps an eye on these feeds, so if you include "Gmail video chat", "Google video chat", or #googlevideochat in your tweet, you can be sure we'll see it!

You can also follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/juberti

Gmail video chat on a plane!

Video Chatting at 35,000 Feet Works Pretty Darn Well - The Steve Rubel Lifestream

As an experiment I tried having a real-time video chat with my dad using Gmail and it worked relatively well. Video/sound cut in and out. Still, it was all quite manageable as you can see from the screen capture...