It is free.
It works "out of the box", and it is easy to use.
It works well, and you do not need to install anything.
What is needed is a web browser and Flash plugin.
Video chat: 3 + 1 = 4 participants
To start video chatting, simply sign in to http://www.FaceFlow.com and add contacts to your contacts list.
Watch this short video on how to use FaceFlow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi3caOmeYik
Most important: Windows users seem to be perfectly happy with FaceFlow (it is a real alternative to Skype, in this sense).
WARNING: FaceFlow does not seem to use any encryption.
Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) is a proprietary protocol developed by Adobe Systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_ ... w_Protocol
Codename Cirrus (previously codename Stratus) enables peer assisted networking using the Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) within the Adobe Flash® Platform. RTMFP is the evolution of media delivery and real time communication over the Internet enabling peers on the network to assist in delivery...
Cirrus has now been upgraded to support new RTMFP groups technology built within Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR® 2.
The most important features of RTMFP include low latency, end-to-end peering capability, security and scalability. http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cirrus/
Security
RTMFP provides secure communications between endpoints. It uses a 128-bit AES with the key negotiated using the Diffie-Hellmann key exchange method. However, it does not provide strong endpoint authentication such as SSL or RTMPS. To aid endpoint authentication, RTMFP and ActionScript expose secure nonces to application developers. These nonces are available at both communicating Flash Player endpoints and are guaranteed to match. By verifying these nonces, end users can ensure that there is no man-in-the-middle attack. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer ... s_app.html
In cryptography, the man-in-the-middle attack (often abbreviated MITM), bucket-brigade attack, or sometimes Janus attack, is a form of active eavesdropping in which the attacker makes independent connections with the victims and relays messages between them, making them believe that they are talking directly to each other over a private connection, when in fact the entire conversation is controlled by the attacker. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack
Security through (or by) obscurity is a pejorative referring to a principle in security engineering, which attempts to use secrecy (of design, implementation, etc.) to provide security. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
Eavesdropping is the act of secretly listening to the private conversation of others without their consent, as defined by Black's Law Dictionary.[1] This is commonly thought to be unethical and there is an old adage that eavesdroppers seldom hear anything good of themselves...eavesdroppers always try to listen to matters that concern them.[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eavesdropping
In short, one may try to believe that a kind of encryption might have been implemented in FaceFlow, if he has the gift of faith, of course. The Egyptian "freedom fighters" had already tried to believe that Skype is secure. Disillusionment was bound to follow http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 20038.html
People who are described as "freedom fighters" are often also called assassins, rebels, insurgents, or terrorists. This leads to the aphorism "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance_movement
Could you imagine how many "freedom fighters" and "terrorists" (usually, naive kids) have been already killed or tortured (in the most brutal way), simply because they believe that Skype is secure? Who is responsible for this "crime against humanity"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_against_humanity
If you program for money, you just do the work. Right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Pieces_of_Silver
You get your silver coins, and somebody else is responsible. Right? Perhaps, those educational institutions (e.g. primary schools) which produce "true believes"... Do not forget that those "terrorists" are very dangerous and very invisible, especially, if they are armed with "true encryption" http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-268.htm
Review: FaceFlow Video Conferencing Uses Just a Browser
http://bestvoipservicereview.com/voip-g ... -a-browser
"Well, this new Adobe P2P voice/video technology is exactly what FaceFlow is leveraging"
http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating ... rowser.asp
Notice that Linux developers are not able to create anything of the sort.
You may try the buggy OpenMeetings, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmeetings
My German friends did try it and resorted to Adobe Connect (as the least evil).
Adobe Connect - Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) - it suffers from huge latency.
FaceFlow - Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) - it has low latency.
Voice conferences with Adobe Connect are not very comfortable because of huge sound delay (latency).
FaceFlow does not have such problems.
Reverse Engineering
Researchers at crtmpserver http://www.rtmpd.com/ are reverse engineering the rtmfp protocol. This is currently a work-in-progress.
Blue5 http://code.google.com/p/blue5/ - A project to create open source versions of RTMPE and RTMFP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_ ... ocol#RTMFP
FaceFlow also works on Linux, if your sound system is not broken.
If you have a buggy distro for masochists, such as Arch Linux, you may need to downgrade Flashplugin viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4353
If you have Ubuntu or Debian, you might be out of luck.
FaceFlow does work with OSS4, but you may need to perform ritual dances with ALSA emulation and the magic patch viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4306
Warning: magic rituals require a certain exactitude as well as "secret esoteric knowledge", because mistakes in ritual performances and occult ceremonies may render them ineffective.
If the magic rituals are performed correctly, FaceFlow video chat (both video and audio) may works well even on a very old computer of 2001 (I have already tried this with Arch Linux and OSS4).
Warning: if you enable ALSA emulation with ~/.asoundrc , this may kill sound in Audacity (it may try to use ALSA instead of OSS4).
The problem is that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1skNgYdJXK8
Therefore, you have to learn the art of magic and occult ceremonies, if you are going to fix sound problems in Linux. Naturally, a very advanced Linux technology (such as ALSA) may require very advanced magic techniques. This is actualy an extraordinary socio-technological phenomenon whose study can provide insights of value into the nature of human civilization and "technological progress". It gave birth to a new scientific discipline, the so-called "anthropology of Linux", and "field studies" have been performed on Ubuntu forums. It is a kind of "interdisciplinary research", anthropologists have to study Linux, and computer scientists have to study anthropology in order to understand what is going on with Linux forums.
In the Attachment: PKGBUILD and the magic patch for alsa-plugins.
To apply the magic patch, you should simply replace ./src/alsa-plugins-1.0.24/oss/pcm_oss.c with the enclosed "pcm_oss.c", and then compile alsa-plugins. Arch Linux commands:
- Code: Select all
$ makepkg --nobuild
$ cp pcm_oss.c ./src/alsa-plugins-1.0.24/oss/
$ makepkg --noextract
$ sudo pacman -U alsa-plugins*.pkg.tar.xz
A dose of "secret esoteric knowledge" is available here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3543&start=30#p15703
