[OTR-dev] Voice/Video OTR (was Re: Codec2 and OTR)

[Peter Lawler]

On 16/02/13 10:16, Greg Troxel wrote:
>    tl;dr - There's a thing called 'codec2'
>    http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?page_id=452  which achieves reasonable
>    digital radio performance at 1200bps (although 2400bps is better)
>
>    The thought bubble was: I wonder if/how/could (etc) OTR could be used
>    to provide encrypted open source digital radio.
>
> Some background and thoughts:
>
>    In the Amateur Radio service, cryptography is (99.9%) not allowed.  So
>    OTR and ham radio will not go together.

Ah rightio, as a non HAM operator I wasn't aware of this. That being 
said, there's probably application in areas where such would be desired. 
Immediately, I think of our local police force who ... well, long story, 
but they're using closed and proprietary systems and our government's 
the most broke in Australia (the ethics of the police force encrypting 
general comms is a total aside to this, as follows). Whilst it may not 
be usable by the HAM community, emergency services such as Fire and 
Ambulance etc. might be able to make use of it. Also, in places of 
severe civil unrest and no internet infrastructure, short burst 
encrypted radio comms might be useful.

<snip>
>    One could send codec output over TCP, inside XMPP.
>
>    One could send the codec output over a UDP stream, associated with
>    XMPP.
>
>
> I would be interested in pointers to audio/video associated acht in
> jabber.
>
> Greg (n1dam)
>
Another thought bubble I had, albeit starting back at the LCA2013 
conference, is getting pidgin-webkit to do HTML 5 video, particularly in 
MUCs (see 
http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/Code_up_your_own_video_conference_in_HTML5.ogv 
) for educational purposes (as the proprietary systems the local 
University used when I tried attending drove me to dispair!) but 
obviously the one-to-one would be useful as well.

I'm semi-committed to hacking on this with one of the more prolific 
Pidgin plugin authors over the next few months. One thing I had already 
though about would be investigating along the way would be how OTR could 
hook in to this as well. However as I'm at about the same stage with 
that as I was last night with my thought bubble. In deference to the 
list, I've renamed this thread to look a bit more broadly at encrypting 
voice/video somehow.

Pete.