Asterisk and Video telephony ---------------------------- Asterisk supports video telephony in the core infrastructure. Internally, it's one audio stream and one video stream in the same call. Some channel drivers and applications has video support, but not all. Codecs and formats ------------------ Asterisk supports the following video codecs and file formats. There's no video transcoding so you have to make sure that both ends support the same video format. Codec Format ----- ---------- H.263 read/write H.264 read/write H.261 - Passthrough only Note that the file produced by Asterisk video format drivers is in no generic video format. Gstreamer has support for producing these files and converting from various video files to Asterisk video+audio files. Note that H.264 is not enabled by default. You need to add that in the channel configuration file. Channel drivers --------------- SIP The SIP channel driver (chan_sip.so) has support for video IAX2 Supports video calls (over trunks too) Local Forwards video calls as a proxy channel Agent Forwards video calls as a proxy channel Applications ------------ This is not yet a complete list. These dialplan applications are known to handle video: voicemail Video voicemail storage (does not attach video to e-mail) record Records audio and video files (give audio format as argument) playback Plays a video while being instructed to play audio echo Echos audio and video back to the user There is a development group working on enhancing video support for Asterisk. If you want to participate, join the asterisk-video mailing list on http://lists.digium.com --- Updates to this file are more than welcome!