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

[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