Installing g729 codec and license

I was wondering if there is any special step for installing the g729 codec and license in a fresh installation of FREEPBX 14

Nope, same method as described in the Asterisk docs when you buy your license:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/codec_g729/README

edit - g729 codec is included for free in the SNG7 (FreePBX 14) Distro.

Except these instructions are wrong for 64bit installations. Just need to make sure you put the binaries in lib64 not lib. (step 4.2)

(Not so for Debian based 64bit)

Not to hijack the thread, but licensing has already expired on g729 codec, you should not need to buy a license for it. If you google around, you will find out how.

That is not 100% true. Digium has taken the stance that royalties are still owed and I have heard from others that state only some of the Patents have expired.

Hi!

What I had read is that while the patents on G.729 have expired, you still have to pay the people who implemented and possibly optimized it.

Should the price of those licenses, now that the patents have expired, be changed? Quite possibly but you still have to respect the licensing of the specific implementation you bought…

The best thing is to avoid G.729 altogether and use G.711 or G.722 whenever possible…

Have a nice day!

Nick

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Woot! We see many people every month with G.729 issues they didn’t even realize they have.

“As of January 1, 2017 the patent terms of most licensed patents under the G.729 Consortium have expired, the remaining unexpired patents are usable on a royalty-free basis.”

RE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.729

If it is on Wikipedia, it has to be true! (-;

Actually the previous statement comes directly from the patent owners, not from Wikipedia, so they are definitely true.

As of January 1, 2017 the patent terms of most licensed patents under the G.729 Consortium have expired, the remaining unexpired patents are usable on a royalty-free basis.

WE do not provide a g729 solution
WE only recommend the Digium solution with Asterisk
WE do not issue legal advice
WE do not control what any other company does or does not do.

tl;dr We recommend use of the Digium’s g729 implementation any licensing questions or concerns are not ours to answer.

WE do not provide a g729 solution

Have you changed your position on this officially?

Hi TheJames…

Sorry to raise the dead but I’m trying to get to the bottom of codec translation problems at an ISP and I came upon this thread. We have many sites experiencing translation problems injected by upstream policies beyond our sphere of influence.

I’m trying to work out what the future of will be for g729 in the context of Sangoma solutions. The ISP in question has enabled G.729b but there seems to be a compatibility issue.

SNG7-PBX-64bit-1805 and SNG7-PBX-64bit-1904 now include the g729 codec with the module loaded by default. Do you know if this compiled by Sangoma or Digium or other?

Cheers,
Nathan

I followed the indications of this link
http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/codec_g729/README
but I am stuck in the (2.3) line, as I am receiving the following error message while issuing this command
/root/benchg729
/lib/ld-linux.so.2: bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory

Any idea for solving this problem?

There is no need to download the codec from digium, the official FreePBX distro includes it already.

Hello,
So according to your post I don’t need to do anything else for registering the G729 licenses
I already own?

BTW I tried to use the Digium Addons inside FreePBX / Admin menu and got this error message

The Digium addons module is not maintained, just remove it. If you are running a reasonably current FreePBX Distro, you can install with:

# g729 
The Open Source G729 code is not installed.
You can install it with the following command:
         yum -y install asterisk16-g729

# yum -y install asterisk16-g729
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, versionlock
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
      *** stuff removed ****
Installed:
  asterisk16-g729.x86_64 0:2002-1.sng7

Complete!

I am curious why you would want G.729 for a new system. The codec is 24 years old and its voice quality is greatly inferior to modern low bandwidth codecs such as Opus.

If you have remote extensions with slow, poor or expensive network connections, Opus is a good solution, supported by most mobile apps, softphones and recent IP desk phones.

If the PBX itself has poor network connectivity, I recommend moving it to the cloud and running Opus between extensions and the PBX.

Most systems have no need for low bandwidth codecs at all.