Adium

Archive for the ‘MeBeam’ Category

Clarifications

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this since Andreas’ blog post went up, so I think everyone deserves a bit of explanation of what the MeBeam video plugin is and isn’t.

The MeBeam plug-in is:

  1. Pretty spiffy 🙂
  2. Developed almost entirely by a third party
  3. Primarily web-based

The MeBeam plug-in is not:

  1. A product of the Adium Team (Andreas works on it, but not as part of Adium—he works on it separately from the Adium Project)
  2. The long-awaited Adium video chat solution
  3. Taking any development resources at all away from that solution (the plugin is extremely simple)
  4. Included with Adium by default

A/V for Adium!

Friday, November 9th, 2007

During all our work on integrating audio and video into Adium, it seems that a company called MeBeam was way ahead of us. They implemented a cross-platform, protocol-agnostic videochat solution using Flash. The best of all: They allowed us to integrate with their service!

What this means is that starting today, Adium has support for videochat!
MeBeam has very compelling features:
  • Cross-platform
  • Cross-service
  • No installation necessary on the invitee side, except for some IM client, a web browser and the Flash plugin
  • Up to 15 people in a multiuser-videochat, not required to use the same IM network
  • Fewer issues with firewalls than other solutions

What do you have to do to make use of it? First, you need a webcam obviously, and a headset is recommended. Then, download the plugin and double-click it, so Adium can place it into the right location. Relaunch Adium, and you’re good to go.

When you want to videochat with someone, ctrl-click (or right-click) them and choose “Initiate MeBeam Videochat”. That’s all!