"Tonight, Ole Andr Vadla Ravns of the[1]Farsight project [2](LGPL), which 'is an audio/video conferencingframework specifically designed for Instant Messengers' for the [3]GNULinux operating system, finished coding a release candidate of[4]libmimic, 'an open source video encoding/decoding library for MimicV2.x-encoded content (fourCC: ML20), which is the encoding used by MSNMessenger for webcam conversations.' Ole, on the libmimic site, remarksthat 'It should be noted that reverse-engineering for interoperability is100% legal here in Norway (and in most European countries).' Looks likethe Free/Open Source Software movement is very close to closing up one ofthe most noticeable software gaps remaining from its glorious efforts."
I always thought the webcam codecs for MSN were made by Intel, not Microsoft. MS claimed there was no webcam support in the Mac version of Messenger because the codec they used was x86 only. I wonder if they could swallow their pride and integrate this project? Doubtful.