Collabora is the founder and maintainer of Farstream, an audio and video conferencing framework. With Farstream, businesses can easily create a multi-platform, multi-user audio/video conference solution that supports a wide range of codecs. Simply put, Farstream (formerly Farsight) is an advanced VoIP/video streaming engine capable of dealing with all known audio/video conferencing protocols
Development history
Philippe Kalaf began the Farstream project in 2005. He was aiming to create a simple-to-use framework that implemented multiple audio/video streaming protocols.
Most of the initial work on Farstream focused on the protocol agnostic API and the RTP plugin. Over the years, the RTP plugin has matured into a very complete RTP stack included support for all advanced features such as multi-user conferencing, RTCP enabled lip-sync, on-the-fly codec switching and many others. The Farstream team then started working on integrating libnice's ICE stack which provides for near 95% NAT traversal capabilities. Alternatively, Farstream's RTP plugin can use raw UDP or multicast UDP as well as the Google and MSN flavors of ICE that are currently deployed.
Farstream uses GStreamer for all its media streaming and processing needs, making it easy to integrate Farstream in your existing GStreamer applications--Farstream plugins are GStreamer plugins. Farstream's generic API makes it possible to write plugins for different streaming protocols.
Collabora's Farstream lead developer and designer is now Olivier Crête.
Users
Chat clients such as Empathy, aMSN, and Pidgin integrate Farstream for peer-to-peer audio and video conferencing.
More information
Farstream's design is explained in much more technical detail on the wiki. Whoever wants to get involved can, at http://farsight.freedesktop.org/wiki/Farsight2.
Developer biography
Olivier Crête
Olivier Crête has degrees in software engineering, including one from École Polytechnique de Montréal. He lives in Montréal, Canada, and is the lead developer and designer for the Farstream audio/video conferencing framework. In his work for Collabora, he concentrates mainly on Farstream.