The fork was started by contributors to Gaim. Many of them lost interest and time in maintaining the fork, which is why it was encouraged that the improvements get merged back into Gaim so that a larger pool of developers could work on them. That merge never happened and the code bitrotted because there was no agreement that it was what we wanted it to be.

The biggest problem had been deciding what software to use for the backend, and ultimately gstreamer with farsight has been chosen.

The version of Gaim-vv that existed was supporting Yahoo, whereas this time the student is implementing a documented voice and video protocol for XMPP and building the framework into Pidgin onto which other protocols' support may be applied.

Some protocols are still impossible because the codecs required don't exist, aren't stable or aren't in released versions of gstreamer or farsight. That said, from 4 years ago, many more of these things are much better supported on Linux than they used to be. There is apparently a summer of code project out there to create codecs for MSN's video chat requirements, so if that shows up on the scene, it certainly makes Pidgin's job easier.

There's also the issue of how this gstreamer and farsight work will port to Windows, and I don't think we're quite sure yet.

It's not that we don't think this is a good idea, it's just that we don't want it half-assed so we want people who actually care about using the feature to be the ones helping to design it.