Re: [Linphone-developers] linphone-desktop package and OpenH264 codec

[Bernhard Schmidt]

Hi Linphone people,

this probably got lost during the christmas break.

As it happens the current automatic download of the OpenH264 plugin from
Cisco is

a) insecure
b) does not work
c) possibly not permissible from a Debian policy point of view

The msx264 plugin would probably be the best option, as x264 with all
the license/patent woes is already in Debian and an additional
mediastreamer plugin to use the system wide x264 library should be a
no-brainer from a license POV. The msx264 project looks dormant though
and does not work out-of-the-box with the current GCC-10.

Is msx264 something that could be supported upstream? Would that plugin
even work these days?

Bernhard

Am 26.12.20 um 23:33 schrieb Bernhard Schmidt:
> Hi,
> 
> so good news first, I have uploaded the full linphone stack (4.4.x) and
> linphone-desktop 4.2.5 to Debian unstable yesterday. If everything goes
> well it will be included in the next stable release.
> 
> Testing it I have observed an issue with the H264 codec and I don't know
> where to start. First of all, if I'm not mistaken we basically have
> three options to get H264 encoding/decoding.
> 
> - msx264
>   - would be the preferable solution since x264 is already in Debian,
> but appears to be dormant at
> https://gitlab.linphone.org/BC/public/msx264 and does not build with GCC-10
> - msopenh264
>   - needs OpenH264 sources which are not in Debian, since Debian
> ftpmasters are really strict to avoid unclear/problematic licenses I
> doubt we can get this into Debian any time soon, and I really don't have
> the power to push this forward
> - have linphone-desktop download the Cisco OpenH264 codec itself
> 
> The last option would be the preferred one. When I enable the slider in
> the GUI it asks me to download the codec. The progress bar appears, a
> success message appears, but the slider stays disabled.
> 
> The download is successful, there is a x86-64 library in
> ~/.local/share/linphone/codecs named libopenh264.so. Even in strace I
> can just see that it opens the file, mmap() on the fd and closes it
> again. Later there is a info message 'Loading "libopenh264.so'
> symbols...", but that's it.
> 
> Since I'm not using video calls I'm not going to invest too much time.
> But maybe there is an easy solution for this. Can anyone shed some light
> on it how to debug this further?
> 
> Bernhard
> 
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