The developers at Collabora have extended Jingle—a multimedia chat protocol for XMPP—so that it can support audio and video conversations with more than two participants. Support for this new XMPP extension, which they call Mingle, could eventually land in Empathy, the GNOME instant messaging client.

Collabora developer Dafydd Harries has written a blog entry about the project and also published a screenshot that demonstrates the prototype. The Mingle project leverages the GStreamer multimedia framework and Farsight, an audio and video communication framework. Farsight provides an abstraction layer around streaming media protocols and provides an API for client applications.

"This year, we wanted to try to take Jingle further by extending it to support more than two participants, and a grant from the NLnet Foundation made it possible for Sjoerd and I to spend time on it," Harries wrote. "I'm now happy to announce that we have a working implementation of the beast we've dubbed Mingle. There is still much that remains to be done, but we think that the basic design is finished."

The next-generation GNOME messaging and communication stack is coming together very nicely. The inclusion of Empathy in GNOME was a big step and now ongoing efforts to bring robust audio and video chat to the platform are progressing at a good pace. Mingle will be a very nice addition to Empathy when it's ready.

The prototype is available from the project's git repository and some basic instructions can be found on the Mingle page of the Telepathy wiki.