Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 6:24 am Post subject: [Asterisk-video] sip/iax2 h.264 video?
Hello all, was hoping someone here could answer a possible-or-not?
question.. I'm trying to send h.264 video from an iax2-based softphone
through asterisk to a SIP phone (the GVX-3000). I am in the process of
trying this out with the latest 1.4 beta.. anyone care to
encourage/discourage me? :)
Any advice/experience/comments or even by-the-ways greatly appreciated!
Tyler
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Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 4:40 pm Post subject: [Asterisk-video] sip/iax2 h.264 video?
Hi Tyler,
What iax2 softphone are you using? Many iax2 softphones are based on
iaxclient library and we're currently working on adding video to it.
In theory it should work, except that IAX2 video codec negotiation is
currently broken in Asterisk 1.4 series. We've patched our Asterisk
to fix the issue, but it's just a dirty hack.
Anyway, please try it and let me know whether it works out for you
Mihai
On Dec 18, 2006, at 1:24 AM, Tyler Daniel wrote:
Quote:
Hello all, was hoping someone here could answer a possible-or-not?
question.. I'm trying to send h.264 video from an iax2-based
softphone
through asterisk to a SIP phone (the GVX-3000). I am in the
process of
trying this out with the latest 1.4 beta.. anyone care to
encourage/discourage me? :)
Any advice/experience/comments or even by-the-ways greatly
appreciated!
Tyler
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Posted: Tue Dec 19, 2006 12:52 am Post subject: [Asterisk-video] sip/iax2 h.264 video?
Quote:
What iax2 softphone are you using? Many iax2 softphones are based on
iaxclient library and we're currently working on adding video to it.
Small world! I was hired to build a simple softphone using iaxclient,
and currently have your working branch checked out.
Quote:
In theory it should work, except that IAX2 video codec negotiation is
currently broken in Asterisk 1.4 series. We've patched our Asterisk
to fix the issue, but it's just a dirty hack.
It's broken for all codecs? That's not good. My employers have had a
change of heart and decided that maybe another codec like h.263 would be
a safer choice, so I was just about to give that a try..
Thanks for all the work on iaxclient, it's at least making my life
easier! :)
Tyler
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Posted: Tue Dec 19, 2006 3:42 am Post subject: [Asterisk-video] sip/iax2 h.264 video?
Quote:
It's broken for all codecs? That's not good. My employers have had a
change of heart and decided that maybe another codec like h.263
would be
a safer choice, so I was just about to give that a try..
It's not a matter of which codec as much as a matter of codec
negotiation. the IAX2 protocol was designed to negotiate only one
codec at a time. With video, you need to negotiate two codecs in
parallel (one for video and one for audio). I posted more details
about it on this list, you can look for it in the archives.
Bottom line is IAX2 needs changes to support video codec negotiation
in parallel to audio. There are several ways of doing it - I
modified Asterisk in the simplest, "let's change as little as we can"
way as possible. I don't think it's the best way, but it works for
us and I'm not going to change it until the community decides which
way it wants to go.
Quote:
Thanks for all the work on iaxclient, it's at least making my life
easier! :)
Glad you find it useful. Please let me know how it goes, we could use
all the feedback we can get.
Mihai
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Posted: Tue Dec 19, 2006 8:36 am Post subject: [Asterisk-video] sip/iax2 h.264 video?
Quote:
It's not a matter of which codec as much as a matter of codec
negotiation. the IAX2 protocol was designed to negotiate only one
codec at a time. With video, you need to negotiate two codecs in
parallel (one for video and one for audio). I posted more details
about it on this list, you can look for it in the archives.
I read your earlier posts about lack of negotiation capabilities in
asterisk.. I guess I'm a little confused about the current state of
affairs.. Maybe you can enlighten me: is any type of video call using
iax2 possible in any publicly available version of asterisk? If it's
only possible using your 1.4 patches/hacks, are those available anywhere?
I've googled and found lots of vague comments that asterisk passes
through video with no option for transcoding, which is fine by me... I
assumed that this meant there is a way to do video, but maybe only when
using sip? Also references to patches backported to the 1.2 series that
I have yet to find... very confusing.
Thanks for all the quick replies, it's a great help!
Tyler
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Posted: Tue Dec 19, 2006 8:57 am Post subject: [Asterisk-video] sip/iax2 h.264 video?
Mihai Balea wrote:
Quote:
>
> It's broken for all codecs? That's not good. My employers have had a
> change of heart and decided that maybe another codec like h.263 would be
> a safer choice, so I was just about to give that a try..
It's not a matter of which codec as much as a matter of codec
negotiation. the IAX2 protocol was designed to negotiate only one
codec at a time. With video, you need to negotiate two codecs in
parallel (one for video and one for audio). I posted more details
about it on this list, you can look for it in the archives.
Bottom line is IAX2 needs changes to support video codec negotiation in
parallel to audio. There are several ways of doing it - I modified
Asterisk in the simplest, "let's change as little as we can" way as
possible. I don't think it's the best way, but it works for us and I'm
not going to change it until the community decides which way it wants
to go.
In addition, it will need to negotiate video attributes. Please check
the "videocaps" branch for code on how to to that in SIP. It's not
finalized at all, we're still working on it, but it's a very good
start provided by John Martin/Aupix.
/O
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Posted: Tue Dec 19, 2006 9:04 am Post subject: [Asterisk-video] sip/iax2 h.264 video?
Tyler Daniel wrote:
Quote:
> It's not a matter of which codec as much as a matter of codec
> negotiation. the IAX2 protocol was designed to negotiate only one
> codec at a time. With video, you need to negotiate two codecs in
> parallel (one for video and one for audio). I posted more details
> about it on this list, you can look for it in the archives.
I read your earlier posts about lack of negotiation capabilities in
asterisk.. I guess I'm a little confused about the current state of
affairs.. Maybe you can enlighten me: is any type of video call using
iax2 possible in any publicly available version of asterisk? If it's
only possible using your 1.4 patches/hacks, are those available anywhere?
The Asterisk Core handles video, so in theory all channels that has
video support will handle it - in passthrough mode.
Quote:
I've googled and found lots of vague comments that asterisk passes
through video with no option for transcoding, which is fine by me... I
assumed that this meant there is a way to do video, but maybe only when
using sip? Also references to patches backported to the 1.2 series that
I have yet to find... very confusing.
We don't have a habit of making a release version unstable by
backporting new bugs to it. New bugs, meaning new features, are
introduced in new versions of Asterisk. Asterisk 1.2 has video support,
mostly in SIP, that has been enhanced in the coming 1.4 release.
reading docs is better than google to get definitive answers.
During the Paris Asterisk Video Task Force meeting it was agreed that
video in IAX2 as a protocol is severly broken, in many ways. When I
reported that to Mark the only comment was "I look forward to your
patches"... Obviously, this wasn't important.
/Olle
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Hi, thanks for the link. I guess what I find confusing is: various
documentation says that both sip and iax2 support video calls in the 1.4
series, but most comments on this list are to the effect that video in
iax2 is "severely broken." Does this mean perhaps that video calls can
be made to happen, but the mechanism [particularly the negotiation
protocol] needs improvement to be more robust/clean/effective?
Just trying to understand the current state of things before I get in
over my head..
Tyler
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Hi, thanks for the link. I guess what I find confusing is: various
documentation says that both sip and iax2 support video calls in the 1.4
series, but most comments on this list are to the effect that video in
iax2 is "severely broken." Does this mean perhaps that video calls can
be made to happen, but the mechanism [particularly the negotiation
protocol] needs improvement to be more robust/clean/effective?
Well, please understand that this is a technical development
mailing list. We seek out bugs and work to kill them and can't
be treated as normal users, since the bugs is what drives us and,
well, makes us happy in a weird way. You may call us nerds. :-)
IAX2 video works for some calls, but not for the things we are
trying to do here, improve things to support many video formats
and many different codecs. On a local lan with normal SIP video
phones, you might get everything to work properly with 1.2.
Interoperability is the goal, on everything from small size video
from 3G phones to large screens on high end VoIP video phones.
In that regards, the IAX2 protocol is broken in many ways and
needs a change in both the specification and the implementation.
/O
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Posted: Tue Dec 19, 2006 3:03 pm Post subject: [Asterisk-video] sip/iax2 h.264 video?
On Dec 19, 2006, at 3:36 AM, Tyler Daniel wrote:
Quote:
I read your earlier posts about lack of negotiation capabilities in
asterisk.. I guess I'm a little confused about the current state
of affairs.. Maybe you can enlighten me: is any type of video
call using iax2 possible in any publicly available version of
asterisk? If it's only possible using your 1.4 patches/hacks, are
those available anywhere?
As far as I can tell, you cannot negotiate a video codec with
mainline Asterisk and IAX2. This makes it impossible to setup any
video call. I'd be glad to hear from anybody who can prove me wrong -
it is possible that I am missing something.
My patch is not publicly available. I can send it to you out of band
if you want... it is very limited in scope and ugly, but it works for
us which means that if you use iaxclient, it can work for you too.
I'm a bit reluctant to release it to the public, since it is not the
best approach to the problem, it's just a quick hack.
Quote:
I've googled and found lots of vague comments that asterisk passes
through video with no option for transcoding, which is fine by
me... I assumed that this meant there is a way to do video, but
maybe only when using sip? Also references to patches backported
to the 1.2 series that I have yet to find... very confusing.
Asterisk has been able to do video over SIP for quite a while now.
This is due to the way SIP/SDP negotiate things. It somewhat works in
1.2, but I'd advise you to stick with 1.4 for video.
There's no transcoding for video and I don't think there will be, at
least not in the near future. It is too CPU intensive and video
codecs are usually proprietary which makes it a hassle to include in
mainline asterisk... at least that's my take.
Mihai
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Posted: Tue Dec 19, 2006 3:15 pm Post subject: [Asterisk-video] sip/iax2 h.264 video?
On Dec 19, 2006, at 4:04 AM, Olle E Johansson wrote:
Quote:
During the Paris Asterisk Video Task Force meeting it was agreed that
video in IAX2 as a protocol is severly broken, in many ways. When I
reported that to Mark the only comment was "I look forward to your
patches"... Obviously, this wasn't important.
Obviously IAX2 is not a priority for Digium right now. In a way it
is understandable, with the industry standardizing on SIP. But there
are a few people that still believe that IAX2 is more efficient than
SIP/RTP, so if anything is to be done, it will probably have to come
from the community.
IAX2 is important for our product line so we have a vested interest
in seeing it evolve. If nobody is leading this effort then I'll
probably step up and just do it. But before I jump into it, is there
anybody who is working on it? Anybody at Digium who is the "keeper"
of IAX2?
Mihai
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