Huge thanks to our Platinum Members Endace and LiveAction,
and our Silver Member Veeam, for supporting the Wireshark Foundation and project.

Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] RTPDump Format

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: "Martin Regner" <martin.regner@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 20:35:23 +0200
 
Matthew Mousseau wrote:

<When you save an rtpdump file, what is the format the file is saved in?

<Does it preserve all the headers (mac, ip, udp, etc) or is it just the rtp information?

 

The rtpumpfile format in Ethereal should (at least more or less) correspond to the binary file format used

by the rtpdump/rtpplay program (rtptools).

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/IRT/software/rtptools/

You will also find a description of the fileformat on that page

(but it may cause some confusion regarding padding/byte order)

 

I think that the description/sourcecode in the Ethereal source code

(file:epan/rtp_stream.c) may be a better source of information:

http://anonsvn.ethereal.com/viewcvs/viewcvs.py/trunk/gtk/rtp_stream.c?view=auto

 

The ethernet/ip/udp headers are not stored in the rtpdump file,

but rtp-header and rtp-payload is stored for each RTP packet

in the stream (and some other information). There is also a file

header in the beginning of the file.

 

When making a program that wants to use the RTP payload data it is

quite nice to not have to care about the various variants of protocols that can

be used on lower layers (possible VLAN-headers, IPv6 or IPv4, EthernetII or ....).

Ethereal is very good on handling various protocols and file formats (snoop, NAI Sniffer, libpcap, ...).

That is the main reason why I want to use Ethereal instead of my old homemade program

to extract rtp-stream data.

 

If you want to store the complete packets including ethernet/ip/udp headers

you can save the stream in e.g. libpcap format instead.

One way of doing that is to select a stream in the "RTP Streams" dialogue and press the "Set filter" button

and the use the "Apply" button in the filter toolbar to do the filtering.

After that you can use "File/Save As..." and save the "Displayed" packets.