You can get the plugin from http://mail.google.com/videochat

But when you click on Install voice and video chat button, Some of you see the page which shows

“The installer should complete in seconds.

If you are having trouble with the download, click here. “ 

But some other see a auto installer page which downloads the Setup.exe file and automatically start installation and prompts you to restart the browser.

Who did this installation without any security problem or violation and we saw a different window which shows the progress bar of the installation. This happens only when , if you have google tool bar installed on your browser , or google desktop, or google gears. For those browsers if the above three is not present, the previous message gets result , and which provide the direct link of the GoogleVoiceAndVideoSetup.exe

It is http://dl.google.com/googletalk/googletalkplugin/GoogleVoiceAndVideoSetup.exe

My Chrome browser does not support automatic installation. Because it is a new guest for my OS and the google additional plugin installation happend before its arrival. So Only Download and manual installation works in that case.

Then what the script exectued behind is 

window.google.update.oneclick.install (install via click) 

and 

location.href =  http://dl.google.com/googletalk/googletalkplugin/GoogleVoiceAndVideoSetup.exe (install manually )

Note the first bit of script window.google , A new object for google, which is created as the result of any one of the above mentioned google services. My Chrome Browser (Since he is a new member) does not know about the window.google (he knows the default methods like window.location, window.document)

Thats allabout the installation part. 

Now About the Video Chat. Obviously it is a flash based video chat mechanism , but the difference is it uses rtcp and udp protocol for video /audio chatting. Did you check the speed of your video chat ? Amaze  rite ?

Then lets check about the video chat request.

When you request someone for a video chat, google ajax posts the following data

req4_jid c2143377409

req4_json            ["jc","xyz@gmail.com","c2143377409",[["192.168.1.100","3801","video_rtp","dgE9SG8VMVdQFrYo","gyB0pRw5dkoEtq21","1","udp","0","local","0"]]]

req4_type          j

req5_jid c2143377409

req5_json            ["jc","xyz@gmail.com","c2143377409",[["116.68.66.85","3784","rtcp","iqV9/3HhhqkjQ4kp","wMSi7BsiOVNtnbJR","0.9","udp","0","stun","0"]]]

req5_type          j

Here xyz@gmail.com is the person , to whom you are going to chat. It sends the video_rtp protocol parameters. To know more about rtcp and udp go to: http://www.javvin.com/protocolRTCP.html

Here 192.168.1.100 is my local area ip (LAN) and 116.68.66.85 is my internet IP address and the numbers starts in 3000 are the port number for the protocol

In addition to this, google also sends its usual parameters like mouse movement detector (To know the state of a chatter, idle or busy / normal )

It also sends the cpu speed info to google server to know about the video processing time. And your bandwidth and speed of internet is already there in google’s hand (See my post on Gmail Architecture to know about the 1pix speed calculation method of gmail)

count    3

req0_evtype       mousemove

req0_time          263866

req0_type          i

req1_focused     1

req1_type          cf

req2_jid

req2_json          ["mf","mf1.0","1.0.2.0",2,{"caps":7,"cpuSpeed":1664,"cpus":2}]

req2_type          j

Gmail sends request for every 3 seconds, and if your counterpart accepts the video chat invitation, your chat iframe loads with a flash object tag .

<embed id=”flash_yj_c_player2″ wmode=”window” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” seamlesstabbing=”false” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”sameDomain” bgcolor=”#000000″ flashvars=”dbg=true&ap=player&nm=yj_c_player2&cb=Recv_yj_c_player2&os=windows&plugin=true&” src=”im/media-player.swf?ver=1.1.6″ style=”width: 100%; height: 100%;” name=”yj_c_player2″ quality=”high”/>

And this flash application does the later works.  This flash application communicate with google media server with Real Time Protocol and your video chat happens that way. The flash activex plugin support helps in accessing your webcam and mic.  Good day , have a nice chat … 

Mail Me for more information

Thanks and Regards

Sajith

Lets watch a fun video with your browser interactive effect. Kill me if you dont like this flash + javascript effect.

Dont maximise (enlarge ) your browser window  after clicking the below link. Wait a moment  after the click.

REMEMBER, DONT MAXIMIZE the window

http://www.fly-a-balloon.be/

Regards

Sythoos

FLV PLAYER
========

You know in now a days most of the video streaming websites use flash player for video streaming. The video file is in flv format. So you need a flash video player for this purpose.
You can download a free flash / flv player from : http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player
or http://flowplayer.org/

FORMAT CONVERSION
===============

Now you need videos in flv file format. In normal cases, most of the videos uploaded by an user will be in avi, dat ,mpg,mp4 or 3gp. So you need a flv converter. You can use either ffmpeg library or mencoder for this purpose

Here is a sample video emmbedding method.

Here src parameter points the swf file, the flash palyer and video parameter points the flv file. This is the format of player i used in http://www.amvizone.com

ffmpeg also can be used for making thumbnails and video watermarking

STORAGE and BANDWIDTH
=====================

Where would you save flv files. In yourown server ? If there is a minimum number of videos, your server might handle it. But consider the case having a large number of videos, your server bandwidth will get used soon. So we have to switch into a CDN (Content Data Network) like amazone S3. What you have to do is just register with any CDN website and use their webservices for uploading and manipulating your video files. These CDN have very reasonable cost for the bandwidth usage and storage space.

Comment here if any queries
Regards

Sajith M.R

If you want to get the FLV file of any youtube video url using php code, here is the solution.

If you are a PHP Programmer and if you are working with any video website, and if you need to grab videos (FLV files) from youtube and to put it yourown site (not object embedding) , Download the Full Source Code given at the end of this article (ZIP)

I used this php code for the Youtube video download tool http://www.googleneedle.com

Here function getPatternFromUrl is nothing but, get the exact pattern of a particular video from any youtube video url format.

In the above case , it returns pzmP4UvZRa4

The function is below

function getPatternFromUrl($url)

 {

$url = $url.'&';

$pattern = '/v=(.+?)&+/';

preg_match($pattern, $url, $matches);

return ($matches[1]);

}

GetFlvFromYoutube is the main function here, which download the flv file from youtube pattern and saves to your local machine.
The function is below:

function GrabFlvFromYoutube( $pattern )
{

 require_once ("phptube.php");

 $tube = new PHPTube ();

 $flv_http_path = $tube->download($pattern) ;

 echo $flv_http_path;

 set_time_limit(0);

 $data = file_get_contents($flv_http_path);

 $new_flv_path = dirname(_FILE_).'/flvs/'.$pattern.'.flv' ;

 file_put_contents($new_flv_path, $data);

 return $new_flv_path ;

}

Hey, the old script I wrote is not working as youtube constantly changing their way they serve the contents.

I updated googleneedle website with code from here: http://1chris.com/post/39/using-php-to-download-youtube-flvs/

It works now, thank you Chris