Re: [PLUG] SIP SoftPhone Recommendations

[Matthew Rosewarne <mrosewarne@inoutbox.com>]

On Saturday 27 December 2008, Casey Bralla wrote:
> So far I've tried Ekiga (looks good in Linux, but the Windows client bombed
> on me) and Skype (works great in Windows, but buggy in Linux).

While Ekiga and Skype are both VOIP software, only Ekiga uses SIP protocol.  
Skype uses an intentionally-obfuscated proprietary protocol that only works 
with Skype.

Using SIP is fairly painful without going through a SIP provider, since it 
doesn't play well with NAT and is really geared towards the client-server 
model.  Instead you might want to try something that supports the Jingle 
protocol (developed by Google), which carries the same "payload" used by SIP 
(called SDP) but managed by XMPP/Jabber.  Unfortunately Google's jingle 
implementation isn't fully compatible with the "standard", but hopefully that 
will change.  There is also IAX, the protocol used by Asterisk, but it is not 
widely supported.

You might want to try:

Coccinella, which uses IAX and runs on all major platforms.
	http://thecoccinella.org/

Google Talk for Windows.  On Linux, you could use Empathy, the upcoming 
Decibel, or the jingle-enabled version of Psi.
	http://www.google.com/talk/
	http://live.gnome.org/Empathy
	http://decibel.kde.org/	(Fairly outdated)
	http://psi-im.org/

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