FYI if anyone wants to try audio and video chat on the new pidgin 2.6.1 release, it didn't work for me (UVC webcam) until I emerged these packages:
pidgin-2.6.1 (with "gstreamer" USE flag enabled) gst-plugins-v4l2 gst-plugins-farsight gnome-media The last item was need to get gstreamer-properties, which let me define which audio/video devices to use for input and test them. If you're a gnome user you've probably already got it. Pidgin devs say they hope to allow configuration from within the app in the future, but right now it has to be done externally.
