[asterisk-dev] Asterisk 1.8: H323 requirements, ptlib and h323plus

[Tony Mountifield]

In article <889062.46425.qm at web162019.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>,
bilal ghayyad <bilmar_gh at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Thanks alot for your reply.
> 
> So does this mean, the normal h323 that is coming with Asterisk 1.8 will not work?

I don't know about chan_h323 in 1.8, but the time I tried chan_h323 in
a much earlier version of Asterisk, I never got it to work. It would
compile, but not pass audio in calls. Also, it was always extremely
fussy about which versions of pwlib/ptlib and h323plus it wanted.

> Because actually I compiled ptlib and h323plus and configured the path (PTLIBDIR and
> OPENH323DIR), but I when run ./configure for asterisk it does not detect the h323 (also the
> samething when running make menuselect, it does not detect the h323 channel).
> 
> If that the case, then no need to try with default h323 .. But I would like to confirm this.

Historically, there have been four different implementations of H.323
for Asterisk.

1. chan_h323 in the main tree was the first, I believe, and used pwlib
and openh323. As I said, I never succeeded with it, and have no idea
whether it is still used successfully by anyone.

2. chan_oh323 was a third-party channel driver from a Greek company,
which also used pwlib and openh323, and even used the RTP stack and
codecs from the latter, instead of Asterisk's own. I did succeed in
making it work, but I found it not as stable as I would have liked
and it was very hungry for both CPU and file descriptors.

3. chan_ooh323c was another third-party channel driver, which was much
leaner and properly used Asterisk's own RTP stack and codecs. It did not
require any external libraries. I had success in using it for a while,
and it felt much more robust than the previous two mentioned above. It
was contributed to the Asterisk addons by the company which originally
wrote it. They stopped supporting it, and for a while it was not
maintaned. I contributed some updates to it myself during that time. More
recently, Digium picked it up again and started maintaining it, so it may
well now be the best supported implementation (rightly so, in my own
opinion).

4. chan_woomera was a generic third-party channel driver for various
protocols including H.323, which again used external libraries. I have
not tried it.

It is some time since I have needed an H.323 implementation, so I have
not used any of the recent versions, but always recommend chan_ooh323c
based on my past experience and the activity I have seen more recently in
svn-commits.

Hope this helps!
Tony
-- 
Tony Mountifield
Work: tony at softins.co.uk - http://www.softins.co.uk
Play: tony at mountifield.org - http://tony.mountifield.org