[asterisk-dev] Upcoming work on console_video support

[Luigi Rizzo]

Hi all,
just so you understand what is the point of some commits you might see,
I wanted to give a bit of information on what we are doing here in Pisa,
mostly related to console and video console support for Asterisk.

Our long term goal is to make asterisk usable as a flexible client
for audio and video. So in the short term we are working on the
following items:

1. make asterisk run as a firefox extension.

   This is actually already working right now, and incredibly
   simple to implement. I am polishing the (small) changes to chan_oss,
   and then will add proper links to the external wrapper to handle this.

   The big advantage of this approach is that one can write the GUI
   within the browser itself (with html, javascript or your choice
   of toolkit) and especially have it easily reconfigurable by
   application programmers.

2. support multiple video and audio input sources, so we can easily switch
   between them during a conversation.

   I expect this part to be done by july, adding a couple of grabbers
   to read from an external player (e.g. mplayer), a still image, and
   a bit of config file/gui support to handle multiple instances of
   each kind of source.

   Effects such as Picture-in-Picture or split screen etc. should be
   implementable with very very little effort.

3. merge chan_oss (and possibly chan_alsa) features into chan_console so
   we can eventually get rid of the two old ones.

   I don't have an exact schedule for this but i expect to carry on the work
   in parallel with #2

In the longer term i would like to work more on the Windows and OSX ports,
both in terms of plain console_video support, and for the plugin side.

As usual, feedback and suggestions on these activities are welcome.

	cheers
	luigi
-----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
  Luigi RIZZO, rizzo at iet.unipi.it  . Dip. di Ing. dell'Informazione
  http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/  . Universita` di Pisa
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