Enabling the G.729 Codec in FreeSWITCH (FusionPBX)

It is not news that many people are searching for the not very new codec G.729. Since 2018 (please google it), the codec G.729 is not under patent, therefore you can use it without paying patent fees. This is a huge step for the VoIP work, why? Because the G.729 codec offers many advantages, one of them is the low bandwidth requirement; it needs about 11 kbps up and down each. If you think it, the less bandwidth required means your service will be more tolerant to the overuse of links. It is very common that in an office or a residence, more than one is watching any kind of streaming or downloading a big file.

Because of this, I think it is very important to tell the world how to install G.729 on your FreeSWITCH server.

First, you should be using my OKay RPM repository. There you will find many RPM's that you usually won't find in other repositories, and among those packages, you will find my RPM's to add G.729 support to the FreeSWITCH. Once you have the repository installed, you just need to type yum install freeswitch-codec-bcg729.

The last part of the configuration is telling FreeSWITCH to load the new module and unload the pass-thru one (if you have it). If you are using FusionPBX, do the following:

1. Go to the modules page and enable the bcg729 codec, disabled any other 729 you may have.
2. Edit the global variables and verify in the codec string you have 729 in the list if you have not.

If you are not using FusionPBX you should review the /etc/freeswitch/autoload_config/modules.conf.xml and /etc/freeswitch/vars.xml files.

If you want to interact directly with the fs_cli, the module name is mod_bcg729.

Good luck!