ConfBridge & video

lemming86_au · December 31, 2012, 6:07am

Hello Everyone,

I recently updated my distro & noticed that confbridge now has basic video support.
I have set confbridge to be the default conferencing app & audio conferences work ok, but I can’t seem to get video to work.

Has anyone tried this yet? If so, would love to hear how you did it.

Regards,
Josh

SkykingOH · December 31, 2012, 6:14am

It’s not what you think it is. To my knowledge an Open Source MCU does not exist.

My definition of an MCU is a device that terminates multiple video streams and combines them into a single frame. This is often referred to as “Hollywood Squares” style conference where the speaking party is in the center position.

Asterisk video support is limited to one to many streaming, the “active” party has presence and that is the video that is streamed to all conference participants.

What I have yet to figure out is how to manage the talking party selection from dial plan.

Here is what the Asterisk documentation has to say about it:

Configured video (as opposed to audio) distribution method for conference participants. Participants must use the same video codec. Confbridge does not provide MCU functionality. It does not transcode, scale, transrate, or otherwise manipulate the video. Options are “none,” where no video source is set by default and a video source may be later set via AMI or DTMF actions; “follow_talker,” where video distrubtion follows whomever is talking and providing video; “last_marked,” where the last marked user with video capabilities to join the conference will be the single video source distributed to all other participants - when the current video source leaves, the marked user previous to the last-joined will be used as the video source; and “first-marked,” where the first marked user with video capabilities to join the conference will be the single video source distributed to all other participants - when the current video source leaves, the marked user that joined next will be used as the video source. Use of video in conjunction with the jitterbuffer results in the audio being slightly out of sync with the video - because the jitterbuffer only operates on the audio stream, not the video stream. Jitterbuffer should be disabled when video is used.

Here is a link to the Asterisk wiki post:

https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/ConfBridge+10

lemming86_au · December 31, 2012, 6:22am

Thanks for the quick reply.

I know its basic, but the follow talker option is all we really need at the moment.

I have read everything I can find on confbridge, including the page you linked to, but discussion on the video aspect of confbridge seems to be very limited so far.

We noticed by accident that it seems to work to some degree with paging groups (it shows a random video feed) but with a normal conference, there is no video stream at all. From what I can tell, it doesn’t appear to be “marking” any users.

Regards,
Josh