ubuntu / sip video / softphone

So, I wanted to test video support with Asterisk. That was easier said than done, because the SIP softphones that ship with Ubuntu don’t all do what they promise.

This was done on a setup that works for numerous hardphones and PBXs out there. Looking through the registration list at any given time reveals at least 40+ different user agents and a large multiple of that if you take the different versions into account.

Drawbacks of Ekiga (3.2.6 and 3.3.2)

• User interface offers no advanced options.
• Refuses to run on a different local port than 5060 (or at least it used to).
• It crashes.
• Hangs during registration for no apparent reason. (Doesn’t do registration at all, but does attempt to SUBSCRIBE to local users on the remote proxy a lot in the mean time.)
• Sends link-local IPv6 addresses in the Contact header, which my provider uses as only contact, resulting in breakage.
• Re-registers immediately with an Expires: 0 (unregister) and claims that it is registered.
• Doesn’t use the outboundproxy for the registration attempts.

Conclusion: completely unusable for a setup that works with every hardphone out there.

Drawbacks of Telepathy/Empathy (2.30.3 and 3.4.1)

• It crashes, but less often than Ekiga.
• The user interface is unintuitive: accounts list available through empathy-accounts binary only; details-of-call pane is truncated so only the first 6 letters of relevant info is visible; setting up a call not possible through the notification area.
• Call setup failed when the default NAT settings were enabled. Things started working when we disabled all NAT features in the client and relied on the NAT-magic of the remote OpenSIPs and Asterisk.
• Video support fails when one end does not have a video source.
• For no apparent reason, it started doing auto-pickup (with video!). That could create embarrassing situations ;-)

Conclusion: less broken than Ekiga, but still unusable.

Drawbacks of Linphone (3.2.1 and 3.3.2)

• It did manage to calculate the wrong MD5 response for an authentication request once. But since it did that when I was messing about with the hostname in /etc/hosts, I will forgive it.
• You cannot disable sending video if you have a working video source without disabling the reception of video as well.
• It works! Even when one of the clients doesn’t have a video input source. Oh wait.. this isn’t a drawback.
• It has a sensible (old school) user interface with settings where you expect them! Another one for the plus side.

Conclusion: use Linphone! Thank you Simon Morlat. [(Now, if you could just replace the ’t' in “standart” [sic] in the About box ;-) )]{style=“font-size:x-small;"}

By the way, the video support in Asterisk did indeed work fine.