G723/G729 Codec installation
NOTE: Remember that these codecs can be used for testing or educational purposes only.
For G729, a license fee applies (10USD/channel). See: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+G.729+Licensing
G723 is not available for Asterisk in any legal form unless you buy the TC400P transcoder card from Digium.
CPU Type
First of all, you need to know your CPU type. Do:
cat /proc/cpuinfo
It will show CPU info, and you will see a lot of info. The most crucial is:
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E4500 @ 2.20GHz
NOTE: this line will vary on different servers, but from it you can see what kind of CPU is on this particular machine.
As an example, here we see that we have Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU.
x86_64?
Next, we need to know whether our server is x86_64. For that we do:
uname -a
And we see that it is:
Linux xxxx #1 SMP Fri Nov 30 00:45:55 EST 2007 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Codec Installation
From scripts
Install scripts for P4 and P4_64 are added in the newest MOR PRO installation tar. You can use them for fast installation.
Manual
Now go to: http://kvin.lv/pub/Linux/Asterisk/ and from the Asterisk 1.4 section (if you use Asterisk 1.4), select the most appropriate codec.
For our example CPU, we will choose:
codec_g723-ast14-gcc4-glibc-x86_64-pentium4.so codec_g729-ast14-gcc4-glibc-x86_64-pentium4.so
Now download these files to your server:
cd /usr/src/ wget http://asterisk.hosting.lv/bin/codec_g723-ast14-gcc4-glibc-x86_64-pentium4.so wget http://asterisk.hosting.lv/bin/codec_g729-ast14-gcc4-glibc-x86_64-pentium4.so
Rename them to:
mv /usr/src/codec_g723-ast14-gcc4-glibc-x86_64-pentium4.so /usr/src/codec_g723.so mv /usr/src/codec_g729-ast14-gcc4-glibc-x86_64-pentium4.so /usr/src/codec_g729.so
CHMOD both of them to 777:
chmod 777 codec_g72*.so
And copy to Asterisk modules:
cp codec_g72*.so /usr/lib/asterisk/modules
Testing
Restart Asterisk and execute in CLI:
show translation
It should show something like this:
CLI> show translation
Translation times between formats (in milliseconds) for one second of data
Source Format (Rows) Destination Format (Columns)
g723 gsm ulaw alaw g726aal2 adpcm slin lpc10 g729 speex ilbc g726 g722
g723 - 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 8 - 9 2 -
gsm 6 - 2 2 2 2 1 2 8 - 9 2 -
ulaw 6 2 - 1 2 2 1 2 8 - 9 2 -
alaw 6 2 1 - 2 2 1 2 8 - 9 2 -
g726aal2 6 2 2 2 - 2 1 2 8 - 9 1 -
adpcm 6 2 2 2 2 - 1 2 8 - 9 2 -
slin 5 1 1 1 1 1 - 1 7 - 8 1 -
lpc10 6 2 2 2 2 2 1 - 8 - 9 2 -
g729 7 3 3 3 3 3 2 3 - - 10 3 -
speex - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ilbc 6 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 8 - - 2 -
g726 6 2 2 2 1 2 1 2 8 - 9 - -
g722 - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Troubleshooting
If Asterisk crashes
If Asterisk crashes when it is restarted, the wrong version of the codec is installed. Remove codecs from /usr/lib/asterisk/modules and repeat all procedures with different - more appropriate - versions of the codecs. You can 'downgrade' your codec version, starting from: codec_g723-ast14-gcc4-glibc-pentium4-sse3.so and keep on going down to codec_g723-ast14-gcc4-glibc-pentium4.so until it works. (This is just an example - for your server, codec versions may vary).
Bad audio quality
If you experience bad audio quality, try downgrading your codec, as explained in previous problem.
Does Asterisk support G729 Annex B?
No, Asterisk does not support Annex B because Asterisk does not support silence suppression/voice activity detection (VAD):
