[scl.org] New Collection for CentOS 7 - pidgin with Voice and Video / Skype for Business integration ?

[Jarek Polok]

Hello all

We are working on a software collection for our organization: pidgin 
messenger with voice/video enabled allowing for integration with
Lync / Skype for Business IM/Voice/Video/File Transfer/Desktop 
Sharing/Conference:

http://cern.ch/linux/docs/lyncav.shtml

(a rather preliminary build, kind of proof of concept, packages quality 
to be improved, but rather functional ..)

It uses the code from: https://github.com/tieto/ (patched farstream2/
remmina/freerdp/libnice/pidgin/sipe) plus few packages from Fedora 25 
(gstreamer1/gupnp/AV codecs etc).

We could contribute this and include in CentOS SCls (if there is some 
interest of course), however there might be a small problem here: among 
all the packages needed there is a h264 video decoder based on ffmpeg
required for Skype for Business video stream decoding (packages: ffmpeg/
gstreamer1-libav/gstreamer1-plugins-ugly): my understanding is that
ffmpeg based packages were not included in Fedora/Red Hat due to 
legal/licensing reasons - and therefore I assume these would not be 
included in CentOS either, is that correct ?

The option could be to provide all other packages and point users to
a 3rd party repository (alike rpmfusion or nux-dextop.. etc) for h264 
decoding functionality (but still we would need to provide 
gstreamer1-plugins-ugly package which needs to be built against 
ffmpeg/gstreamer1-libav .. which could be problematic to build in 
cbs.centos.org as would require access to 3rd party repos in build
system...)

Is this something we could contribute ?

I would be glad to hear your opinion.

Best Regards

Jarek