Can MCU work as Video Codec Transcoder alone

[jayrajag]

Hi,

I have the below scenario.  I want to know if I can use the MCU to work as a Video Transcoder alone and not to intiate any conference. Or for that matter, Is there any Transcoder available (Not the MXE due to some issues which I am not sure of) for us to use in the below situation.

1. Lobby Phone which is MPEG4 Part 2 codec registered as 3rd party SIP in CUCM. It has a Camera to transmit the video and audio. But no monitor.
2. A SIP wallpad which is H.264(MPEG4 Part 10) registered to a 3rdparty SIP Proxy server which supports only supports H.264. This SIP wallpad has Audio and Monitor and sends the Video and Audio to other endpoint.
3. Note : Lobby Phone cannot be registered to the 3rd party SIP Proxy as it does not support mpg4 part 2 codec.
4. SIP Trunk between the CUCM and the 3rd party SIP Proxy server.
5. Here we are able to do the Audio call between these two SIP devices. But the video from the Lobby phone, which is in mpg4 part 2, does not gets to display in the wallpad. This is because the 3rd Party SIP Proxy server can handle only h.264.
6. So I am wondering if we can have any MCU kind of device to transcode the video from the lobbyphone to h.264 and send it.

Thanks,

JK

[Nick Halbert-Lillyman]

A couple of ideas;

You can use router based PVDM 3 modules as CUCM registered transcoding resources.  You'd need to look at the specs to ensure that they support both the codec your require.  Note that you would need to add them to the appropriate media resource groups etc.

Another way would be if you had a Codian MCU (45xx/85xx etc) you could create one or more conferences with pre-configured endpoints.  For example, if you configured conference 555 with pre configured endpoints 1234 and 4567, when you dialled 555 from endpoint 1234, it would auto-dial endpoint 4567 and visa versa.  You could use translation patterns, partitions and calling search spaces to make it seem invisible to the user who is dialling - e.g. user at 1234 could dial 4567, then CUCM would translate that dial string to 555 and send it to the MCU conference in the background, which in turn would dial out to 4567.

I believe you can also register the MCU's above to CUCM as a conferencing resource, but I'm not sure whether or not it could act as an inline transcoding resource without actually hosting a conference.

[jayrajag]

Hi Nick Halbert,

Thanks for the suggestion . I was trying both the options.

PVDM3 Option : In this option, when i tried configuring, I cannot find any document for One to One communication between the two devices, but rather it transcodes only if it is a Conference call. Can you suggest us any link to any document or procedure on how to configure this transcoding for non-conference type.

Codian MCU Option: In this option, the VCS or CUCM, whichever is the SIP Server, it requires both the devices to be registered in it. But in our scenario,. we have only one device registred as 3rd party sip device to our SIP server. THe second endpoint is registered in other 3rd party SIP Proxy server where we have the SIP Trunk between the 3rd party SIP Proxy and our VCS(or CUCM). So not sure how to solve this case.

Any help is much appreciated in this.

Thanks,

JK

[Nick Halbert-Lillyman]

Regarding the PVDM modules, unfortunately it's not something I've had much experience with myself so I'm not really sure sorry.

With the MCU, you can still apply the same dial-plan logic - the difference being that for the endpoint registered to the 3rd party SIP server, apply an inbound calling search space on CUCM to the SIP trunk that goes to the 3rd party SIP server.

This calling search space needs to be able to call the partition that your new route pattern or translation patter is in (that transforms a dialled string of 1234 to 555 in the above example) but NOT to be able to call endpoint 1234 directly (you will probably need to make a new, seperate partition or two to achieve this).

Let me know if you need any more explanation.