I’ve been working on a project here at work to setup a
system to passively record all H.323 video conferences that take place.
Our office has nine VC units in conference rooms that are in use on a regular
basis. We get requests to record certain training events but right now we
are limited to using a VCR attached to the VC unit. Tapes are a pain, the
quality is awful, and there just has to be a better way. I really don’t
want to simply change the VCRs out with DVR/PVR units as that still introduces
conversion of the video.
What I want to do:
Have a machine (or multiple) setup near the boarder on a
mirror port.
Tell Wireshark (or multiple instances)
Listen
for call setup
Write
the call to a capture file
Listen
for call teardown
Stop
capturing
Reset
and continue listening
After the file is captured, filter out just the video stream
and write it to a video file (AVI container) that any media player can
view. This will probably require a separate application to transcode the
raw H.264 video to something like MPEG, WMV, QT, etc..
Ultimately I want the entire process to be completely hands
off. All calls, regardless of content, will be recorded. Those
files will reside in a folder for a set number of days before being
purged. After an event the presenter has the option of retrieving the
video file from the shared folder.
I’ve done some digging and found the script RTSP263DumpPayload.pl
http://wiki.wireshark.org/RtpH263DumpScript
but I’m not having much luck moving past this point. Automation is
the key here. Having a system that will automatically dump both forward
and reverse streams to files, strip out the headers, and encode to a specific
format would be ideal.
All nine VC units have static IP address, so running nine
instances of Wireshark each with a specific capture filter is a possibility.
I also started a thread about this at ArsTechnica but we’ve
not come up with much. http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/469092836/m/518001111831
Thank you,
Brandon Kahler
Senior Network Analyst
bkahler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
601 McPhee Rd SW
* Olympia, WA 98520
Desk 360-464-6791 * Fax 360-464-6900
http://www.esd113.k12.wa.us
