Live Messenger alternative?

[Kintaro]

I need one that supports webcams, pidgin is fine 99% of the time, however lack of webcam support means I have to load up Windows Live, and when Microsoft bricks my copy of Vista with an update to kill pirate copies, it will mean I have to load up VMware, Windows Version X, and then Windows Live. That would be frustrating. The codec might be heavily patented though :/.

[Refalm]

I had good experiences with aMSN. Webcam works fine when your viewing the other party, I haven't tried webcamming myself, but it should work.

[SiMuLaCrUm]

Emesene.
http://www.emesene.org/
Windows version is still beta and has plenty of bugs.

It will have webcam support soon. Or at least that's what the site says. I personally like it more than aMSN.

[Kintaro]

They said gaim (now known as pidgin) would have video support two years ago. Somehow I don't find these promises so promising.

[worker201]

iChat!

Works especially well with a built-in iSight camera.

[Kintaro]

I don't have one (iSight camera), and iChat doesn't support MSN. Sorry sir, but you have failed.

Also, I don't have Mac OS X either, double fail.

[Refalm]

emesene is pretty good, I like it that they use GTK+ instead of that horrid Tk Framework that aMSN is using.

But apparantly, it's the only one with webcam support.

[Kintaro]

I just noticed aMSN is open source? Why the hell haven't the other OSS ones ripped out its video support?

[Refalm]

Probably NIH-syndrome, or it was written in the Tk Framework (which is horrid).

[Kintaro]

Probably the case, getting a Tk component to work in Pidgin (C++) would be pretty painful for the developers. However they could just see how MSN webcam shit works from its algorithm or something.

[Orethrius]

This is assuming that it's not a political issue.  Software patents in the U.S. are shaky ground right now.

[Kintaro]

It probably is a patent issue, the other issue is pidgin seems seldom used on Windows, and Linux hardly supports many webcams anyway.

[SiMuLaCrUm]

I don't think Pidgin will ever have many new MSN features. Most of it's features are for Yahoo IM or AIM. Not sure about the other protocols. At the moment, Emesene is very buggy. When I launch it, I get a big fat exception.

[Refalm]

Really? I found that Emesene works really great on my machine.
If you don't use a webcam, it's ten times better than aMSN.

[Refalm]

There's another one:
www.mercury.im

It's great, supports webcams. However, it's a bit slow.