MSN Webcam reverse engineered

[Lord C]

"Tonight,

• Ole Andr Vadla Ravns of the
[1]Farsight project [2](LGPL), which 'is an audio/video conferencing
framework specifically designed for Instant Messengers' for the [3]GNU
Linux operating system, finished coding a release candidate of
[4]libmimic, 'an open source video encoding/decoding library for Mimic
V2.x-encoded content (fourCC: ML20), which is the encoding used by MSN
Messenger for webcam conversations.' Ole, on the libmimic site, remarks
that 'It should be noted that reverse-engineering for interoperability is
100% legal here in Norway (and in most European countries).' Looks like
the Free/Open Source Software movement is very close to closing up one of
the most noticeable software gaps remaining from its glorious efforts."

Links:
    0. http://sourceforge.net/users/oleavr
    1. http://farsight.sf.net/
    2. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html
    3. http://kernel.org/
    4. http://www.jblinux.net/libmimic/

Am I the only who read this and went "YES!!"?
This does, as mentioned, fill a great gap in Open Source Software.
That gives MS fanboys one less pro. :)

Even my sister could use Linux now.
Fully working msn is a _must_ here in the UK.

[themacuser]

w00t, now someone can add videoconferencing/audioconfreencing to aMSN!

Well, using aMSN is not supporting microsoft as:
1: It's not their client
2: It's not displaying their paid ads
3: It's using their services, costing them money

[bedouin]

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.

[Lord C]

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.

Their codecs were made by Logitech.

At one time you had to manually download a program from Logitech's website, in order to use webcam feature on msn.
Then MS incorporated it into their program.