Rhythmbox and Telepathy
There was two Google Summer of Code about music integration in GNOME in 2005:
- Gshrooms : Music rooms in Gaim (now Pidgin) with Rhythmbox,
- Playlists sharing with DAAP in Rhythmbox.
Vincent has also written a Rhythmbox plugin (proposed for inclusion) to update the status in IM clients (Empathy or Gossip).
What can Telepathy do for music sharing? There is a limitation in the DAAP Rhythmbox’ plugin: you can share your music with people on your local network or if you know the IP address of your contact. However, users don’t know what is an IP address and it may not be reacheable if the contact is behind a NAT.
A better interface should just be to select the contact in the contact list and the DAAP protocol is routed to the remote contact through a Telepathy stream tube. This feature request has now a proof-of-concept implementation and you can enjoy the screencasts:
However, the current implementation is not usable: it uses In-Band Bytestreams (IBB, XEP-0047). This means that all your Ogg Vorbis files go through the Jabber server in XML, encoded in base64. Even if it was not too slow, it would abuse the public Jabber servers.
Let’s hope Telepathy will support real P2P stream tubes soon!