With all this talk of funpidgin, I realized that a lot of people don't know of kopete. It is an IM client, separate from pidgin (and funpidgin) IMHO it is buggier, slower and less easy to use than pidgin, and it doesn't support GTalk (XMMP) BUT it has video support.

you can get it by running
Code:
sudo apt-get install kopete
if, when you try and use video, it gives an error about some jasper related thing, then run

Code:
sudo apt-get install libjasper1
or

Code:
sudo apt-get install libjasper-runtime

I'm not sure which one fixes it, but I got both of them, and 1 of them does the job.

now, I am waiting to see what happens first, if pidgin gets video working, or kopete gets Gtalk working, whichever one it is, will become my full time IM client.