Fedora 12 is meant to improve webcam support and allow video calls using the free theora codec. Sadly, there's a bug in gst-plugins-base that prevents many cams from working correctly in such a scenatio. However, upstream has a fix¹ that may very useful to include in Fedora's package. [1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=601627
Guillaume Desmottes says it is a good idea to include the patch in distribution packages until the next -base release. It's already in Debian Sid and will soon hit the Ubuntu repository.
Pretty certain this is already in the gst-plugins-base snapshot in updates-testing for F12...
I just upgraded to the very latest gstreamer and -bad packages from koji on both ends (gstreamer-plugins-base-0.10.25.1-1.fc12.i686) and the problem is still 100% the same. So either the patch is not in yet or the patch did not fix my problem (empathy guys seemed to be sure it would...)
Indeed, our snapshot was made the day before the patch was committed...
gstreamer-plugins-base-0.10.25.1-2.fc12 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 12. http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/gstreamer-plugins-base-0.10.25.1-2.fc12
gstreamer-plugins-base-0.10.25.1-2.fc12 has been pushed to the Fedora 12 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update gstreamer-plugins-base'. You can provide feedback for this update here: http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F12/FEDORA-2009-12524
With the latest packages on both ends I still see my original problem... gstreamer-plugins-good-0.10.17-2.fc12.i686 gstreamer-0.10.25.1-2.fc12.i686 gstreamer-plugins-base-0.10.25.1-2.fc12.i686 telepathy-farsight-0.0.12-1.fc12.i686 telepathy-mission-control-5.2.6-1.fc12.i686 telepathy-glib-0.9.0-1.fc12.i686 telepathy-gabble-0.8.8-2.fc12.i686 empathy-2.28.1.2-1.fc12.i686 empathy-libs-2.28.1.2-1.fc12.i686 So, if you are sure the patch in question is now included then the GST developers were wrong and there's still another bug :(
gstreamer-plugins-base-0.10.25.1-2.fc12 has been pushed to the Fedora 12 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.