Digium, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Asterisk open source PBX project, announced the release Asterisk 15 on Oct. 3, pushing the 13 year—old effort into the world of video conferencing.
Asterisk first had a stable release back in 2004 with the debut of Asterisk 1.0, and was most recently updates in September 2016 with the Asterisk 14 update.
Among the key new innovations that have landed in the Asterisk 15 milestone is new support for video endpoints. The new video capabilities are a function of adding multi-party selective forwarding unit (SFU) video conferencing to Asterisk’s existing ConfBridge audio conferencing application.
“All audio-only devices that were previously supported by Asterisk and ConfBridge will continue to be supported,” Charlie Wilson, Director, developer products at Digium told EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet. “Additionally, we’ve attached video-enabled endpoints such as WebRTC browser clients and SIP-based video door phones.”
Wilson noted that prior to Asterisk 15 video support in Asterisk was minimal. He explained that there were (and still are) many ways to manipulate audio, but video was only supported as a single stream.