Capturing an H323 video stream?

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Gunnar Wolf skrev:

> This might be the wrong list, but I see this group maintains several
> H323 packages.
> 
> I am interested in capturing an H323 conference, recoding it to OGG
> Vorbis/Theora, and streaming it to an Icecast server. Now, none of the
> videoconferencing packages I've seen so far seem to be pluggable into
> a pipe or even into GStreamer. Is there anything you could recommend
> me to do this, or is it time for me to dive into the APIs? 

I haven't succeeded myself so far, but the following looks promising (in
some combination):

 * Asterisk 1.4 (foundation of the below pieces)

 * libmpeg4ip (needed to compile app_mp4)

 * app_mp4 (Asterisk module to transcode and save video call to disk)

 * ooh323c (Asterisk H.323 module that supposedly actually works)

 * gnugk (H.323 gatekeeper to bridge H.323 clients with Asterisk)

 * gstreamer0.10-plugins-good (includes asteriskh263, I think)

 * gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg-full (includes ffenc_h263p)

 * gstreamer0.10-plugins-farsight (might do it all, maybe not yet)


libmpeg4ip is packaged unofficially here:

    deb www.debian-multimedia.org/ etch main

Beware though, that only the latest tarball is packaged, and the MPEG4IP
project tends to only infrequently release their work as tarballs.
Newest version 1.5.24 only in CVS contains bugfixes, improved H.264
support, and fixes for compiling against most recent FFMpeg.



App_mp4 (and other related modules) is at
http://sip.fontventa.com/content/view/12/41/ - they are very new, so you
probably need to follow the Asterisk-video developer discussions, a
lurker archive is at
http://mailsnarfer.empoweredcomms.com.au/lurker/list/asteriskvideo.en.html


Ooh323c is contained in asterisk_addons, available at
http://ftp.digium.com/pub/asterisk/ - and work-in-progress Debian
packaging at svn://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-voip/asterisk-addons/trunk



The Gstreamer tools are for the following:
http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-video/2006-May/000055.html

Not realtime streaming, only reencoding a file into a format readable by
Asterisk, but perhaps a start. It seems that you need to use rtph263ppay
(and not rtph263pay, which use an older variant of H.263).



So, in short, I believe you need to get dirty somewhere. I would love
someone proving me wrong ;-)


 - Jonas

-- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

 - Enden er nær: http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm