Re: Asterisk video conferences using NetBSD?

[Dima Veselov <kab00m%lich.phys.spbu.ru@localhost>]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 10:39:22PM +0530, Mayuresh wrote:
> In the past, I have used Asterisk as a SIP server on NetBSD and found it
> to be working fine.
> 
> I read Asterisk supports video calls as well. Has anyone tried it for
> video calls, particularly conference calls?

We are using lot of hardware with video support, mostly Cisco phones
and telepresence devices.

If you mean conferencing by confbriging video calls with mixing on asterisk
that can work only like "showing a picture of currently speaking person".
We dont use it much because its quite a mess and not needed. 

If you mean conferencing by mixing several videos in one video to show to
the client - I am not sure Asterisk have any options build-in for that.

All conferencing we do is based on vendor-like mixing video in devices
themselves, mostly telepresence devices.

As for general video problems - Asterisk have basic video support and poor
SDP, so when phones try to achieve good solution for both - asterisk won't 
help them a lot. This leads to problems between different hardware - for
example Cisco 8945 have different ratio than Cisco 9945 and video is very
loose, because they can't choose right video stream properties. Anyway we 
have more succesful configurations than unsuccessful. 

My general advice - give different hardware a try and then decide if it will
work.

> Would one need `better' CPUs for that or most of the codec part is done on
> the clients? The requirement isn't large scale. Imagine something like
> 10-15 concurrent users on the same conference call. There aren't expected
> to be too many such calls running in parallel.

Asterisk won't do recoding, all the codecs are done on device itself. We had
lot of video calls going through Asterisk on Sun Fire Sparc 2-core, 1GHz, 
slow as an elephant (system slow, not calls). All you need - good network 
performance. This system was able to connect at least two concurrent calls 
in HD quality with 6 Mbit/s limit each with no visible latency. Now our
main asterisk is Core4Quad (released in 2010) and I never noticed any
significant load.

> Also which version of asterisk is advisable? I am on NetBSD-8 (still!).

We are on 16.7.0 on NetBSD-8 and its working like a charm.

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Dima Veselov
Physics R&D Establishment of Saint-Petersburg University