GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 601039
Video chat does not work in empathy.
Last modified: 2010-06-07 07:56:43 UTC
We have laptop A and laptop B. Both are running Fedora 12 rawhide (Nov 6-7 ish). Both have the following: empathy-2.28.1.1-3.fc12.x86_64 telepathy-farsight-0.0.12-1.fc12.x86_64 farsight2-0.0.16-1.fc12.x86_64 pulseaudio-0.9.19-2.fc12.x86_64 So laptop A has a webcam. This webcam works great in cheese so I don't think the webcam driver is at fault. Both laptops are connected via Google Talk in empathy. Laptop A attempts to connect to the user on laptop b by right-clicking his name in empathy's buddy list and initiating a video chat. Video chat window pops up - you can see laptop b user's avatar and a PIP of laptop A's webcame video and it looks to be working fine. As soon as empathy appears to have connected to laptop b, the entire empathy client crashes. Laptop B still believes there's hope and sits waiting for a successful connection that never happens. I tried to install the necessary debuginfo packages but somehow it seems the backtrace still has some missing symbols. It looks like this crash may be related to pulseaudio and/or gstreamer. Just to note, I read the empathy FAQ on live.gnome.org and followed the instructions for getting around Fedora issues to the letter (have all the required gstreamer plugins, removed gstreamer ffmpeg plugin, updated farsight2, etc) and the crash is still occurring. Johanbr noted in #telepathy that there was a crasher in telepathy-farsight that was fixed in 0.0.12, but both laptops here are using that version so apparently this is a different crasher. Also note that around the time the crashes occur I consistently see messages like this (one per empathy crash it seems): Nov 6 23:49:35 localhost pulseaudio[9094]: ratelimit.c: 195 events suppressed Nov 6 23:58:52 localhost pulseaudio[9094]: ratelimit.c: 89 events suppressed Nov 7 00:04:24 localhost pulseaudio[9094]: ratelimit.c: 82 events suppressed i'm attaching the backtrace from abrt here. let me know if there is anything i can do to help track this down; i can reproduce it very reliably.
Created attachment 147157 [details] backtrace
this is also filed against fedora https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=533542
Thanks for your bug report. Could you attach Empathy logs please? Did you try to make an audio only call? Does it work? I debugged a similar issue last week with a Fedora 12 user. The crash was in the H264 encoder. Can you try to edit /usr/share/empathy/codec-preferences and add a new line containing "-1" after [video/H264]? It should look like: [video/H264] id=-1 This should disable H264.
Hi Guillaume, thanks for the fast reply - - On both laptops we edited /usr/share/empathy/codec-preferences as you advised. - Then we tried an audio-only call. Worked no problems. - Then we tried a video call. Laptop A has a webcam, Laptop B no camera. The call seems to connect but then disconnects before any data is sent. I am attaching the debug log from the empathy help menu. The only difference in the video call from before is that empathy does not crash anymore. But the video calls do not work. We tried multiple times. Here's the relevant rpms we installed to try to get this to work; both computers have these same versions: gstreamer-plugins-ugly-0.10.12-4.fc12.x86_64 gstreamer-plugins-bad-0.10.13-10.fc12.x86_64 gstreamer-plugins-base-0.10.25-5.fc12.x86_64 gstreamer-plugins-flumpegdemux-0.10.15-8.fc12.x86_64 gstreamer-plugins-good-0.10.16-7.fc12.x86_64 telepathy-farsight-0.0.12-1.fc12.x86_64 farsight2-0.0.16-1.fc12.x86_64 empathy-2.28.1.1-3.fc12.x86_64
Created attachment 147327 [details] debug data from empathy from during the failed video call
tp-fs-DEBUG: 1.257802e+09: stream 1 0x23fd5e0 (audio) close: close requested by connection manager Could you please post empathy log from the other side and the gabble logs from both sides?
Created attachment 148554 [details] gabble log from laptop a
Created attachment 148555 [details] empathy log from laptop A
Created attachment 148556 [details] gabble log from laptop B
Created attachment 148557 [details] empathy log from laptop B
Hi Guillaume! So we disabled H264 on laptop A with the logs above. We just realized it was not disabled on laptop B. So we tried again and empathy no longer crashes, but the video and audio do not work either. In fact, in the video preview window on laptop A, the image is frozen as soon as they connect.
Created attachment 148558 [details] empathy logs from laptop A - with h264 disabled on both machines
Created attachment 148559 [details] gabble logs from laptop A - with h264 disabled on both machines
Created attachment 148560 [details] empathy logs from laptop B - with h264 disabled on both machines
Created attachment 148561 [details] gabble logs from laptop B - with h264 disabled on both machines
Reading logs, the 2 machines seem to be on different LAN; is that correct? Do you still have no sound if you try to make an audio call only? Still no video if you try to add video afterwards? An interesting debugging step could be to add our echo bot to your roster and then try to call it: echo@test.collabora.co.uk I'd be interested to know if audio and/or video are working with it. (Btw, would be nice if you could set the mime-type of logs to text/plain when attaching them so they can be read directly from the browser :)
Hi Guillaume, that is not true, the machines were connected to the same wireless access point. We just tried to use audio with h264 disabled on both machines. It worked but was extremely extremely quiet. The video works perfectly with the echo@test.collabora.co.uk test address!! Do you want logs from that successful session?
(In reply to comment #17) > Hi Guillaume, that is not true, the machines were connected to the same > wireless access point. Right, I miss-read the log; sorry. > We just tried to use audio with h264 disabled on both machines. It worked but > was extremely extremely quiet. You can tweak the input volume using the side pane on the right. Did you try to enable video once the audio call was established? > The video works perfectly with the echo@test.collabora.co.uk test address!! Do > you want logs from that successful session? Cool. Did you try using both laptop?
Closing the bug for now. Please reopen if you still have issues with a recent version of the Telepathy stack.