[Asterisk-video] different video formats in Asterisk

[Klaus Darilion]

Hi!

AFAIK (please correct me when I am wrong) there are 3 different ways to 
get video into Asterisk:

1. native Asterisk video support. Some applications like voicemail, 
Playback and Background support recording/sending of video. The video 
must be h263 or h264 in a proprietary Asterisk format. This could be 
generated with ffasterisk or gstreamer (both methods are quite 
complicated). Audio can be provided as .gsm or .wav. The video will not 
be transcoded, thus the client has to support h263 or h264

2. app_mp4: The video must be in a .mp4 or .3gp container with hinted 
audio+video tracks. Which Audio codecs are supported? Which Video Codecs 
are support? Will app_mp4 make use of Asterisk's audio transcoding 
capabilties? Video transcoding can be done explicitly with app_transcode.

3. app_rtsp: Asterisk will receive the video from a streaming server 
(usually DSS). Which formats are supported? Can DSS process any video 
formats or do we need to transform the video into .mp4 before giving it 
to DSS?

IMHO a big problem is that there is no single common way to generate 
video files for Asterisk and all the methods to generate video are very 
complicated (except you can afford to by helix mobile producer).

comments, corrections and answers are very welcome
thanks, klaus