Tracking development of pjsip and SIP SDK for smartphones
Version 1.2 has been released, among other things it contains:
Good news, everyone!
Finally, after months of developments (read: delays!), version 1.1 is ready for your download. This release contains major feature enhancements, namely support for Nokia native codecs (we use code name APS-Direct for this feature) and a new Audio Device API.
APS-Direct is our codename for functionalities to use the hardware codecs that are supported by sound devices e.g. Nokia Audio Proxy Server (APS) and/or VoIP Audio Services (VAS) directly, bypassing media processing in PJMEDIA. The Nokia APS and VAS support codecs such as G.711 (PCMA and PCMU), G.729, iLBC, and AMR-NB, though the availability of these codecs may vary according to the handset types. There are significant benefits of using these codecs instead of software codecs (in PJMEDIA-CODEC), with the main benefits are performance (hardware vs software codecs, latency) and the given codec licenses/royalties. Due to these benefits, the ability to use these codecs in PJSIP applications is very desirable, hence the support.
This has been a major development in PJMEDIA, as traditionally PJMEDIA works with PCM (linear, L16) audio samples. With APS-Direct, audio frames from the sound device are in encoded format, so some components along the media path need to be updated to support encoded frame format. Understandably, some features cannot be used when encoded audio is active, for example the mixing feature of the conference bridge. Please see APS-Direct wiki for more information.
Half way during APS-Direct development, we discovered that the existing sound device abstraction API couldn’t cope with the new features, for example handling of encoded frames, setting the audio device routing, etc. We could of course patch it here and there, but we decided that creating a new one would be a much better alternative. So a new Audio Device API was developed.
For more information about this release, start from the PJSIP Download page. Enjoy!
pjsip on has been running on iPhone and iPod Touch for quite a while. Samuel Vinson (also responsible for making possible VoIP on Nintendo DS) was the first to announce a successful port to iPhone and iPod Touch even before the official SDK became available.
Siphon has already been available for developers and also on Cydia, an alternative distribution platform for iPhone applications. voiphone is another project starting up, based on sound device code from Siphon.
Now another milestone is reached, because an iPhone softphone called SipPhone on iPhone (how many phones can you have in a sentence!), has been released on the official App Store by VNet Corp of Shanghai. This means users unable or unwilling to install Cydia are also able to enjoy VoIP over Wi-fi with their favourite providers, instead of dictated by which client you use.
(For those reading on a computer with iTunes or on the iPhone itself here is the direct link to SipPhone on App Store.)
So how does it work? After downloading from App Store, following the installation instructions, I was able to add Teluu’s sipgate.co.uk account (look, No SIM!):
Main SIP account settings
Additional SIP account settings (optional)
I was then able to choose from my Contacts and make a call as normal. I didn’t do any extensive voice quality testing, just some quick calls. I will try to record some conversations to illustrate better the voice quality.
Another feature that needs pointing out is the ability to have multiple accounts. It was quite easy to toggle which account is active at any one time. The pjsip.org SIP domain uses OpenSER OpenSIPS, so I know this client is compatible with it.
Multiple accounts support for the iPhone SIP client
The source of the application is available at their forum, it seems you can get it even if you are not a customer. This is beyond the requirements of the GPL, so nice touch on VNET Corp people.
I still haven’t been unable to compile it, so as can be seen I have a question pending there.
Overall of course the main issue of VoIP over wi-fi in iPhone remains: no background task. That means, unlike other mobile devices such as Nokia which uses Symbian, it cannot receive any calls while you are doing something else.
Let me know your comments if you have tried this iPhone SIP client.
As we finish the current iteration of Symbian S60 implementation, most
importantly the implementation of APS-direct, we need all of you to
participate in testing it. This is from experience we know mobile
devices are very tricky and can behave differently from one firmware
to another.
So we need as many Symbian S60 3rd Edition phone as possible. The test will involve installing a test application, checking a few things, and filling in a report form
To do this we need your IMEI and a few other details, this is because
the requirements of Symbian Signed, we need to ‘burn’ your IMEI into
our test application.
Don’t reply with your details to the public list, instead fill in this
form: http://l.teluu.com/symbiantesting
We can’t promise everyone will be accepted, because there is a hard
limit to the number of IMEIs we can burn, and we’ll prioritize
variation of devices, rather than first come first serve.
If you can get your friends family neighbours to join in that will be
even better.
If you any questions, just leave a comment and.
Thank you all!
At PJSIP we always feel we don’t express our gratitude well enough for all of your contributions to this project, be it comments, criticisms, bug reports, patches, and so on. Especially some people deserves our special thanks for their extra efforts in helping others, or for their perseverance in solving problems (read: bugs) when the going gets though.
This award goes to the most most difficult, most elusive, or perhaps even most silly bug that was found this month. And the award goes to ….
Bug #696
Bug #696. This had caused “RTCP clock skew detected” message to appear every now and then in the log and subsequently causing wrong RTT calculation.
What makes this bug a winner is that this has been so elusive that it had been living in the code for two and half years. We were aware of it but simply didn’t know how to fix it!
So our special thanks goes to Guido Fischer for solving this bug. You are smart. 
The winner of Bug of The Year 2008 Award goes to …
Bug #660
Bug #660, INVITE request is not retried with authentication, even when correct credential is available, if the 401/407 response is received after a 100 or provisional response (!).
This bug really deserves a special award. It is so trivial, and yet it had been living with us for as long as I can remember, it had passed so many tests by us and interop tests with so many products by so many people, and it even slip though undetected in two SIPit events. It simply cannot be more silly than this!
So we thank Bug #660 for truly shaming us all.
Champion of The Month earns our recognition for achieving expertise, participating in community activities, and sharing their knowledge with other community members in the PJSIP mailing list. This month we would like to award this to ..
Gang Liu
Gang Liu, for being actively helping other list members in the past few months, as well as contributing several patches. You have demonstrated your expertise with PJSIP and we as well as I’m sure others have found your contributions to be very valuable. You deserve this award!
Recently we’ve been in contact with the yaSSL open source SSL project, discussing possibility of supporting CyaSSL as well as the current OpenSSL.
yaSSL is a small footprint and portable SSL implementation
The small footprint and portability of CyaSSL seems a very good match, so anyone interested in kickstarting this? I guess this can be from both ends, so maybe a yaSSL community member can try to see the TLS functionality in pjsip/pjmedia or from the pjsip side, looking into yaSSL stuff.
Let me know if you’re interested, and we can take it from there.
With the release of 1.0, we have reached a significant milestone. More than three years in development, 250,000+ lines of code, gruelling global interoperability testing on three continents, you can download pjsip 1.0 right now.
This would have never happened if it weren’t for all of you — more than 500 members of the pjsip community. A big thank you is in order.
"Hello to All, we've reached 1.0! Thank you for all your support."
We’ve decided to draw a line on what we feel is a comfortable feature set, in particular for desktop client developers on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Of course we can not fit it all, so keep those comments and requests coming, it matters to us.
For mobile platforms, consider the current feature set a technical preview. We know it’s not as easy to get started, and sometimes there are still issues. This is because mobile devices are really fragmented. You can have exactly the same device, but different firmware version can break applications.
"Mobile SIP SDK, anyone?"
Going forward we’ll strengthen and stabilize the mobile devices support, starting with Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile. We look forward to the Symbian Foundation open source version, more open always lead to more innovation.
I would also like to take this opportunity to formally introduce Teluu, as the company behind pjsip. It was started more than two years ago, alongside the pjsip open source project. Teluu is where we handle alternative licensing, direct developer-to-developer support, and the occasional customization work.
As always we welcome comments, feedback, both praise and criticism, and whatever else. You can leave a comment here, on the mailing list, or everywhere else on the web. As long as Google can find it, we should know about it
pjsip has always been cross-platform, basically it runs anywhere. Moreover,
we interpreted platform liberally, so in addition to multiple operating
systems and processor, we also have runtimes-as-a-platform (RaaP?) like
the Python VoIP API support (and the community has expanded along this line to Java SIP API and C# SIP SDK).
There is a new breed of platform coming to the desktop, broadly called Rich
Internet Application (RIA). Names like Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe AIR,
Sun JavaFX have been wading in this area. On my desktop I got Twhirl, a
Twitter client built on top of AIR.
So is this platform going to be relevant to SIP clients, I wonder? Would it
fit into a IP phone developer’s strategy? Is a RIA softphone possible or
even desirable? Would we call these things Rich Internet Telephony
Applications (RITA)?
Click your thoughts on the poll below and let me know what you think! (UPDATE: The poll application seems to be not working for some people – here is the direct link to the: Rich Internet Telephony Application Poll)
Well, according to Symbian. I’ve been attending Smartphone Show 2008, because we have an open source Symbian SIP stack.
In the first two hours of the I’ve been listening to Symbian itself, but also Motorola, Sony Ericcson, and Nokia.
I’ve lost count of how many times ‘open source’ is mentioned. Nigel Clifford, Symbian’s CEO, mentioned a figure of $300m in royalty revenues to be ‘given back’ to the ecosystem.
That’s a really clever way of putting it. He did admit some of them will be ‘pocketed’ instead of being used to ‘innovate’.
Which is another rather overused word during the whole show. One of the main argument for going open source is innovation over control.
Of course, one can always say Apple seemed to be able to out-innovate everyone in the mobile space, by having total and absolute control (Benoit Schillings, Qt CTO, alluded to a ‘dictator’ style of development).
So the strategy to beat Apple (and to a lesser extent Microsoft and Linux) is to club together in the Symbian Foundation, and using open source as the common denominator, a level playing field.
Number of devices already shipped, number of companies involved is frequently cited. It is hoped the ‘ecosystem’ will be large enough to eclipse (pun intended) other mobile platforms. The newly appointed Executive Director Lee Williams, also do not want to put a ’30% tax’ on the ecosystem.
It worked in the software tools space with Eclipse, but a mobile platform is a different beast altogether.
You can read up other thoughts on this matter from Dean Bubley and Simon Judge. Incidentally I can answer Simon’s wondering about UIQ: It’s officially dead. Patrik Olsson, VP and Head of Software at Sony Ericsson, said ‘you can get ready for Symbian Foundation-based Sony Ericsson phones now by using S60′.
New features Latest bug fixes PJSIP builds
