Malcolm Davenport January 17th, 2008

Howdy,

Another day, another update. This time, it’s for you, Digium TC400B customers. The TC400B is a card that performs onboard encoding and decoding of G.729a and G.723.1 audio and interacts with Asterisk. It’s useful for people that don’t want to be burning their CPUs using our software-basd G.729 codec, or for those that need G.723.1 - since we don’t offer a licensed software codec for that (the consortium fees are massive).

What’s the update?

It’s actually not one, but two updates. Hopefully this reminds you a little bit of my pevious post with its Ron Popeil references.

The first update is in regard to G.723.1. Presently, our TC400B customers are confined to using the 5.3kbit/s variety of G.723.1. Unfortunately, we had some customers with equipment that wanted to only send 6.3kbit/s G.723.1. We now support both 5.3kbit/s and 6.3kbit/s G.723.1. Hooray!

The second update is in regard to channel count. The TC400B is capable of running in one of three modes: G.729a mode, G.723.1 mode, and mixed mode. In G.729a mode, the channel capacity is 96 simultaneous G.729a transcodes. In G.723.1 mode it’s 92 G.723.1 5.3kbit transcodes. And, in mixed mode, it’s any combination, up to 92 simultaneous, of G.729a or G.723.1 5.3kbit/s. The *news* is that the channel count for G.729a mode has been increased now to 120! That’s right, 120 channels instead of 96 - a full 24 more channels and a 25% improvement. “That’s Hot.”

Feedback we’ve heard:

“Malcolm, this is the most amazing news I’ve heard all day. It’s even more fantastic than the Spice Girls concert in Los Angeles.

“How do we take advantage of these updates?”

Elementary, Watson. Simply download and install the -current 1.2 or 1.4 drivers release from our downloads site.

“So I get that 25% more, simply by getting updated drivers?

Yes.

“What’s the catch?”

There’s not one.

“So I get more, for free?”

Yes, you do.

Good luck, and happy transcoding.

Cheers.

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