[Asterisk-video] Report from Video Task Force in Paris!

[Olle E Johansson]

This week, the Asterisk Video Task Force has had it's first workshop  
in Paris.

First of all, we really have to send a big THANK YOU to Inria, the  
French research institute, that
hosted the event. They have been great hosts and provided us with  
both food, power and
network connectivity!

A special thank you to Philippe Sultan at Inria for organizing all of  
this.

To summarize:

1.4 testing
=========
We started with testing the 1.4 beta. Some notes

- Direct RTP media setup did not work as expected. During the setup,
   the payload types was not copied between the call legs, resulting
   in bad calls with failing media. When answering, the capabilities
   of the callee is not used when sending 200 Ok to the caller.

   We opened a branch called "earlyrtpfix" to try to fix this. Almost  
there.

- IAX video is broken. Currently, the capabilities fails and video  
disappears
   somewhere in the call setup. Even with that fixed, there is a  
problem with
   not sending the frame sequence number across the bridge, which may
   result in bad resequencing on the other side. Out of order frames  
will be
   renumbered as they where in perfect order... IAX2 also seems to have
   problems with video frames larger than the MTU and video frames that
   are transported in multiple RTP payloads.

- We could set up calls between several phones. Ojo videophones,
   Aupix, Grandstream, Wooksung, Counterpath Eyebeam, Ekiga
   and Kapanga was tested as well as some unbranded softphones
   in development.

- We do have several problems in the RTP subsystem, that we
   need to look into.

Future things discussed
===================

- Direct transcoding from alaw to ulaw
- AMR support
- Integrations with 3G, support for 3G videocalls in libpri/chan_zap
- Exchange of more complete codec capabilities during call setup
   (branch videocaps)
- T.140 realtime text support
- Development of a contrib/videotoolbox for conversions, ivr video  
prompts etc
- Integration with remote transcoders
- Integration with OpenMCU videoconferencing
- Neil's videoconference switch for app_conference
- H.323 video support
- Videolan integration for streaming video - VideoOnHold
- Next meeting in a sunny place
    After discussion, sunny is optional, no rain or snow is  
mandatory :-)

Other things discussed
==================
- Cool hardware
- Interoperability between various devices
- Where to eat tonight
- Will we catch the bus to Inria?
- Does this device support xxx or yyy
- How do we get John off his crackberry?
- Is the Beaujoulais Noveau drinkable this year?
- How much video transcoding can we do on a Nokia 770?

The discussion will continue on the asterisk-video mailing list.

Thanks to everyone that joined us for this meeting! It's been really  
productive and has
moved Asterisk forward. Meeting for a few days really
helps, especially when you have a strong focus - like "video".

/O