Colleague called me for assistance with a video call that wouldn’t set up when dialling in to a VC bridge.
The call flow was from a Polycom endpoint to the new Conductor-managed vTS bridge that I’d installed a week before. The endpoint could dial into the Rendezvous VC bridge, but calls only had audio. Some additional testing showed that this wasn’t working for point-to-point calls to Jabber as well, which helped us rule out the bridge completely.
My colleague pulled a Wireshark from Jabber, and the signalling confirmed a codec support issue on the Polycom:
Jabber INVITE with H.264:
However, the response clearly showed that our Polycom unit didn’t like this, and marked the video streams as inactive:
My colleague did some reading up on our somewhat outdated Polycom unit, and we ultimately found that some release keys and a firmware upgrade would be needed. Customer not too happy, but nothing to do here other than upgrade…
However, my colleague did post a question to me:
Can we not just set some video codec preferences for this call, or at least for the call into the VC bridge?
Well, the answer is… no!
As of 11.0 this is not supported. However, thankfully this does appear to have been considered in the roadmap for CUCM 11.5:
This is good news, as the CUCM-based video architecture is now quite mature, having gone through several iterations since it’s inception from CUCM 9.x.
As the market for Skype for Business grows, H.265 begins to create more and more headaches due to patent licensing problems, and Cisco subsequently begins to punt Thor as a potential future video standard, this new feature should hopefully solve some problems down the line.
#dontcalltac
