view README @ 31356:017b7ff5a894

During a voice call, Pidgin now sends constant audio traffic, even when there is silence. Especially on slower connections, this can waste considerable amount of bandwidth by transmitting nothing but ambient noise. I used peak level data from GstLevel? in the input branch of media pipeline to control a GstValve? put between audio source and Farsight confbin. Whenever the peak drops below defined threshold, the valve gets closed, when sound level reaches above the threshold, valve opens again. This effectively blocks sending data over network in the silent periods and in my tests this simple method worked quite well. Silence threshold might need to be fine tuned (or switched off at all) depending on microphone hardware and/or the noisiness of surrounding environment. I will propose an user interface for this in a separate ticket. Future improvement can be adding support for comfort noise (RFC3389), as the line now stays completely mute when suppression is active, which can be a bit distracting. I made a tiny change in level parameter that is passed to PurpleMedia?'s "level" signal handlers. The value converted from dB to percent was multiplied by five. Searching through source code history seems this was done to make the value variation displayed on call dialog level meter widgets look bigger. I think it is better not to confuse future developers and pass the unmodified percent value to the handler and multiply only in gtkmedia.c: level_message_cb() where it has reason. committer: John Bailey <[e-mail]>

Purple, Pidgin and Finch
========================
See AUTHORS and COPYRIGHT for the list of contributors.

libpurple is a library intended to be used by programmers seeking
to write an IM client that connects to many IM networks.  It supports
AIM, ICQ, XMPP, MSN and Yahoo!, among others.

Pidgin is an graphical IM client written in C which uses the GTK+
toolkit.

Finch is a text-based IM client written in C which uses the ncurses
toolkit.

These programs are not endorsed by, nor affiliated with, AOL nor any
other company in any way.

BUILD
=====

Read the 'INSTALL' file for more detailed directions.

These programs use the standard ./configure ; make. You need to use
gmake, BSD make probably won't work. Remember, run ./configure --help
to see what build options are available.

In order to compile Pidgin you need to have GTK+ 2.0 installed (as
well as the development files!). The configure script will fail if you
don't.  If you don't have GTK+ 2.0 installed, you should install it
using your distribution's package management tools.

For sound support, you also need gstreamer 0.10 or higher. For
spellchecking support, you need libgtkspell (http://gtkspell.sf.net/).
Your distro of choice probably already includes these, just be sure to
install the development packages.

RUN
===

You should run 'make install' as root to make sure plugins and other files
get installed into locations they want to be in. Once you've done that,
you only need to run 'pidgin' or 'finch'.

To get started, simply add a new account.

If you come across a bug, please report it at: http://pidgin.im

PLUGINS
=======

If you do not wish to enable the plugin support within Purple, run the
./configure script with the --disable-plugins option and recompile your
source code.  This will prevent the ability to load plugins.

'make install' puts the plugins in $PREFIX/lib/purple (PREFIX being what
you specified when you ./configure'd - it defaults to /usr/local). Purple
looks for the plugins in that directory by default.  Plugins can be installed
per-user in ~/.purple/plugins as well.  Pidgin and Finch also look in
$PREFIX/lib/pidgin and $PREFIX/lib/finch for UI-specific, respectively.

To build a plugin from a .c file, put it in the plugins/ directory in
the source and run 'make filename.so', e.g. if you have the .c file
'kickass.c', put it in the plugins/ directory, and from that directory,
run 'make kickass.so'.