I’m not a fan of Transcoding. It costs resources, often leads to reduced quality and adds latency.

Through some fancy SDP manipulating footwork we can often rejig the SDP order or limit the codecs we don’t support to cut down, or even remove entirely, the need for transcoding in the network.

If you’re not yet familiar with SDP have a read over my post on SDP Overview.

Modparam

There are no module parameters for SDP ops, we’ve just got to load the module with loadmodule “sdpops.so”

Use in Routing Logic

We’ll pickup where we left off on the Basic Stateless SIP Proxy use case (You can grab the basic code from that post), but this time we’ll remove PCMU (Aka G.711 μ-law) from the SDP body:

loadmodule "sdpops.so"


####### Routing Logic ########


/* Main SIP request routing logic
 * - processing of any incoming SIP request starts with this route
 * - note: this is the same as route { ... } */
request_route {

if(is_method("REGISTER")){
        sl_reply("200", "Ok");
}

        xlog("Received $rm to $ru - Forwarding");

        append_hf("X-Proxied: You betcha\r\n");

        #Remove PCMU (G.711 u-law) by it's SDP Payload ID
        sdp_remove_codecs_by_id("0");

        #Remove PCMU by name
        sdp_remove_codecs_by_name("PCMU");


        #Forard to new IP
        forward("192.168.3.110");

}

onreply_route{
        xlog("Got a reply $rs");
        append_hf("X-Proxied: For the reply\r\n");
}

We can remove the codec either by it’s name (PCMU) or by it’s payload ID.

For removing it by name we just specify the name:

#Remove PCMU by name
sdp_remove_codecs_by_name("PCMU");

And by payload ID:

#Remove PCMU (G.711 u-law) by it's SDP Payload ID
sdp_remove_codecs_by_id("0");

We may want to remove all but one codec, again super simple:

#Only keep PCMA codec
sdp_keep_codecs_by_name("PCMA");

If you can’t help but transcode RTPengine now has this functionality, have a read of Transcoding with RTPengine and Kamailio and it may be worth looking over Virtualized Transcoding Dimensioning for an idea of how powerful your box is going to have to be.