[asterisk-users] MP3 Crashing Asterisk

[A J Stiles]

On Friday 04 Feb 2011, Timothy Smith wrote:
> Hi Users,
>
> I have a problem with some of my mp3 files. they crash the system
> (Asterisk 1.6.2.14 on a x86_64 running Fedora 13 ) when it tries to
> play them.

Some distros used to use mpg321 instead of mpg123  (early versions of which 
used to suffer from non-free licence restrictions, but newer versions are 
LGPL)  and the installer created a symbolic link so it could be invoked as 
mpg123.  This was known to cause problems for Asterisk, which preferred the 
original mpg123.

Try running
$ mpg123
with no arguments, and note the author's name which appears in the output.  If 
you see "Michael Hipp", then it really is mpg123.  If you see "Joe Drew" then 
this is really mpg321.

For confirmation try
$ ls -l /usr/bin/mpg123
If you see a symbolic link  (cyan and permissions start with lower-case "l")  
then this is the problem.

You can always build the "proper" mpg123 from the Source Code  (if you aren't 
used to doing this, you may have to install the -devel versions of any 
packages which you have installed but the configure script thinks you 
haven't, is all).  When you run `make install` it probably will install 
itself in /usr/local/bin/mpg123 .  Most distros have a default path set to 
look in /usr/local/bin/ before looking in /usr/bin/ ; but if you really want 
to make sure, then you can just copy the binary over the top of the existing 
symbolic link;
# cp /usr/local/bin/mpg123 /usr/bin/
You might need to repeat this step last if you ever re-install mpg321 from an 
RPM package.

-- 
AJS

Answers come *after* questions.