shkype

An example of the menu based UI used to place video calls
User 1 video
User 2 video
The accept/reject dialog

Inspiration

The world has changed greatly over the past 10 years.
With technologies such as Usenet, Gopher, and the World Wide Web™,
the world has never been more connected.

Introducing Shkype, the completely original and non-derivative videophone
client for your VT100.

What it does

It can place video calls between two peers through the command line only (no windowing system required). Doesn't require much computing power or bandwidth (right now, we are just sending video frame by frame with no compression but it still requires less than 1 MB per second).
Featuring 90s HD 128x55 resolution

How I built it

Using mpv and netcat as the main components, and the power of the UNIX (TM) philosophy

Challenges I ran into

Dealing with issues regarding synchronizing with subshells and with other networked systems.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Written in only bash, doesn't use that much bandwidth.

What I learned

Bash scripting, netcat

What's next for shkype

More robust networking support. Owing to the text oriented nature and the fact that all the data being sent is of the form of an escape sequence (which leads to repetitiveness), there are tremendous possible gains in speed and latency through compression.