Is there an IRC client for Ubuntu with inline media?

Does any IRC client exist for Ubuntu which displays media inline (perhaps via plugin)?

A few IRC clients for Mac OS X (e.g. Textual and LimeChat) support inline media and will auto-embed linked images: if someone posts a URL to the channel, the IRC client displays it inline if it is able to be embedded, like a .jpg or .png image. However, I cannot find a client for Ubuntu with this feature.

The closest I can find is Quassel, which can display a URL preview on mouse hover, but that's not the feature I'm requesting and the webkit support for this preview is not enabled in the Ubuntu packaged build on 12.04.

To illustrate: without the feature, you get just text:

<rduplain> | askubuntu.com
<bot     > | https://i.stack.imgur.com/PTVCH.png
<rduplain> | good luck

With the feature, the chat view is expanded and the image is inserted:

<rduplain> | askubuntu.com
<bot     > | https://i.stack.imgur.com/IPbDF.png

<rduplain> | good luck

Solution 1:

The Lounge will let you do that through its link prefetching mechanism. For the record, link previews currently look like this:

This screenshot is part of the whole app, which looks like this:

FYI, the author from Subway (mentioned in the other answer) now recommends to use The Lounge.

Solution 2:

Pidgin supports IRC as well as a number of different protocols.

This patch for this plugin seems to be what you are looking for:

The screenshots are from different protocols, but it should work with IRC too. I haven't tried it since I don't use Pidgin and it requires some dependencies I also don't have.

Another suggestion is Subway, a web-based IRC. I don't use it either, but it seems to run on Ubuntu: