Thanks to the hard work of the Empathy, Telepathy and Farsight teams, VoIP is finally usable with Empathy. So you can now very easily do audio/video calls using Jingle and SIP. There is still a lot of UI polishing to do but it should basically work, so feel free to test and report problems.

You'll need Empathy 0.22.1, recent versions of Farsight, telepathy-stream-engine, gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins-farsight, and a gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg with H263 encoder if you want video support.

If you're using Debian Sid you should have the right versions of the Telepathy stack but need the Debian multimedia repo for video support (which is optinnal).

On Ubuntu Hardy you have to use Telepathy PPA and Medibuntu repos if you want video support. So just add to your sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/telepathy/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://fr.packages.medibuntu.org/ hardy free non-free

Happy calling!