This is the Ekiga manual. It is updated continuously. If some information is not enough clear for you, or if you think you have found an error or an obsolete information, feel free to contact us.
high definition video (the video is limited to 704x576).
See ToDo List for more information.
Feel free to contact us to report a bug or make a suggestion regarding the application or this manual.
You need a microphone audio input into your computer. A headset is recommended to better prevent echo; however, a webcam with an internal microphone, or a separate microphone will also give good results.
A webcam is not mandatory. If you do not have it, you will still be able to see the other party.
If you are behind a very restrictive network access, be sure to have correctly configured the firewall and the NAT router/gateway (as shown at routers and firewalls section in this manual).
When starting Ekiga for the first time, the Configuration Assistant will launch automatically. The Conﬁguration Assistant is a step-by-step wizard that will guide you through all the steps involved in creating the basic conﬁguration you will need to use Ekiga. You should go through all of these steps properly, otherwise the assistant will re-appear (when it has not been completed) or Ekiga will not function correctly (if some of your answers have been inaccurate). You may run the Configuration Assistant at any time from the Edit menu.
The identity page of the assistant was considered useless, since Ekiga uses the user name from the operating system. As such, it is not available anymore starting with Ekiga 4.2.0.
The connection type page of the assistant is a bit confusing and error-prone. As such, it is not available anymore starting with Ekiga 4.2.0.
The audio devices page of the assistant is not really useful, since by default Ekiga selects the right device. As such, it is not available anymore starting with Ekiga 4.2.0.
The video device page of the assistant is not really useful, since by default Ekiga selects the right device. As such, it is not available anymore starting with Ekiga 4.2.0.
Note that the echo test accepts only some video and audio codecs, cf. fun numbers page, so you have to ensure that they are checked on in your Ekiga preferences.
Peering: this is an agreement between VoIP service providers which enables the users of one service to call users of another. This is usually implemented by dialing a special prefix number, followed by the number of the recipient (on the 'other' service). See technical details for details.
Voice mail: if you are not available, a caller may leave you a voice message. Ekiga tells you how many messages you have waiting. The free PBX Asterisk provides this feature.
Enum: a method to provide a unified numbering system between the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and various VoIP providers. It is supported by some (but not all) service providers. See appendix for details.
For general cases, a SIP address is recommended.
You can open the accounts window by selecting Edit -> Accounts. This window allows you to add and register with SIP, H.323 and other types of accounts or VoIP services.
To add a H.323 account, simply click on Account -> Add a H.323 Account. A dialog will appear and allow you to enter several parameters. The meaning of the parameters are similar to SIP account, see previous section.
To add an XMPP account, simply click on Account -> Add a Jabber/XMPP Account. A dialog will appear and allow you to enter the connection parameters.
For this to work, Ekiga should have been built with XMPP support (--enable-loudmouth, which by default it is disabled).
Network neighbours is a special group in the roster, called Neighbours, which automatically discovers and shows all ekiga users from your LAN. It is updated each time a users connects or disconnets from your LAN, or changes his status or message. Neighbours group is visible, at the bottom of the roster, only if there is at least one ekiga user in your LAN. It is available only if ekiga has been built with support for it.
You can set a presence status message in Ekiga that advertises your presence to your contacts. Ekiga features three preset status messages, and within each one of these presets, custom messages can be created.
Technical note: Ekiga uses SIMPLE PIDF (Presence Information Data Format). Ekiga v5 uses RPID (Rich PID).
To define a custom message, click on the drop-down status message list in the main Ekiga window, and select "Custom message..." under the preset status message category you wish to use. In the pop-up window that appears, enter your custom message.
To delete a custom message, click on the drop-down status message list in the main Ekiga window, select Clear, and select the custom message you wish to delete.
When a call arrives, Ekiga rings and displays a notification window in the systray allowing you to accept or reject the call. If notifications are not available in your system (which is the case for Windows systems), then the call window is shown instead allowing you to accept or reject the call.
Some systems have broken notifications, for example they do not show the whole text in case of long text, or they inform that they support notifications but they do not. In this case, when a call arrives, you have to manually open the call window and accept or reject the call from there.
This is useful for debugging purposes when your partner is in the same network as you.
Ekiga allows you to call real phones. You simply have to register an account to a Internet Telephony Service Provider. You do not need any specific hardware to be able to do PC-to-Phone calls: a simple soundcard is enough. Using a headset to avoid echo problems is however highly recommended.
Once the account has been created, you will receive a login and a password by e-mail. Simply enter them in the dialog, resume the Configuration Assistant until the last step, press Apply, and you are ready to call regular phones using Ekiga.
Not working anymore (???): You can also exchange text messages with H.323 Ekiga users, but only while being in a call. To do this, simply click on the new tab icon, and a new tab will automatically be created allowing a conversation with the user you are on a call with. To be checked: H.323 text chat however only works from Ekiga to Ekiga.
Ekiga allows to do some simple formatting of the text (italic, bold, underline) and use some emoticons, accessible from within an active chat window itself.
Ekiga supports several audio and video codecs. It includes codecs with excellent quality, as well as codecs with medium to good quality. Generally, the higher the quality of a codec, the more bandwidth or CPU power it requires. The first time the Configuration Assistant is run during the initial setup of Ekiga, an optimal selection of the video parameters (size and maximum video transmitted bitrate) is automatically made based on your network connection.
If you wish to change the audio input or output device set by the Configuration Assistant, open the Ekiga preferences window with Edit -> Preferences -> Audio -> Devices. Ekiga will attempt to automatically detect audio hardware (e.g. a USB headset, or a webcam with a built-in mic) plugged into your computer. These audio devices will then be listed here, allowing you to select them for your calls.
The reason to have different output and ringing devices is that you might be interested to have headphones for output and external speakers for ringing, so that you hear incoming calls even when you are far from the computer.
In Ekiga v5, setting maximum buffer size was removed. To sump up, Ekiga uses a buffer for incoming packets (jitter buffer) with dynamic size. If packet jitter is small, jitter buffer is made small too, and audio packets will play soon after their reception. If packet jitter is big, jitter buffer is automatically increased, and audio packets will play late after their reception, without however exceeding a predefined value (500 ms as of Ekiga version 5).
Echo cancellation will only work if you use the same sound device for in and out audio, e.g. echo cancellation won't work if you use the microphone on your webcam and the output sound from your soundcard (PCI). Echo cancellation is based on Speex software.
If you wish to change the video input device set by the Configuration Assistant, open the Ekiga preferences window with Edit -> Preferences -> Video -> Devices. Ekiga will attempt to automatically detect video hardware plugged into your computer. These video devices will then be listed here, allowing you to select them for your calls.
You can test your webcam by clicking on the video camera icon (on upper left of Ekiga window) and check that it shows anything. See test your camera section in this manual for more information.
Ekiga permits a fine control of the H.323 settings in the Advanced H.323 Settings section of the preferences.
then your NAT type is symmetric NAT.
Blocked: you probably have a firewall, usually on your own machine, which blocks Ekiga packets. You have to tell it to allow Ekiga to access Internet.
Cone NAT or Port Restricted NAT: you probably use H323 and you need to forward a few other TCP ports, see below.
Symmetric NAT: Ekiga cannot guess what ports will be used, and you need to reconfigure your router. You will have either to forward ports manually to your internal machine, or to dynamically navigate the router, as written in the next section (if it allows it, and a must do if you use Ekiga on several machines). An alternative solution is to use exterior help, i.e. an external proxy; however, there is no free such proxy, because they use a VERY high bandwidth (Skype for example avoids this problem by using users with public IP addresses themselves as proxies).
Many VoIP forums report massive problems with some embedded SOHO routers blocking VoIP protocols restrictively and need the built in Firewall turned off (not that bad, you are still behind NAT and mostly protected). For example, Netgear is known to have "very good hardened" firewalls. Ask Manufacturer Support and update Firmware first.
For good sound quality a router with built-in QoS is a must have, "V" type products should have it, older stuff rarer. The best routers to buy are Linux based and have GPL'ed firmware.
listen_port is the port Ekiga listens for incoming connections on: 5060 in UDP for SIP, and 1720 in TCP for H.323.
tcp_port_range is the range of TCP ports beside the listen_port that Ekiga uses for the H.245 channel with the H.323 protocol. That port range is not used by SIP. It is not used either when H.245 Tunneling is enabled, which is in general always the case, except when calling old H.323 implementations like Netmeeting.
A last port used by Ekiga is the one used by ZeroConf (the Bonjour / Rendez-Vous technology from Apple), allowing for automatic Ekiga client discovery on the LAN. However, this port cannot be changed.
To understand the problems with symmetric NAT, read technical details.
This type of NAT cannot be served by a VoIP program without a "trick". Skype for example works in this case too because it uses the other users of skype as proxies, otherwise said the other users give (are forced to give) resources (CPU and network bandwidth) for Symmetric NAT skipe users.
Finally, the simplest solution, if it works, is to change the NAT from Symmetric to another type. For that, if Ekiga shows a dialog box about that on startup and you have access to your router configuration, you may try the following.
If the above simpler methods do not work, you can use an outbound proxy (to be set in Preferences): siproxd for SIP, and GNU Gatekeeper for H.323.
When connected to a very restricted network such as a university or a corporate network where for example only 80, 443 and 8080 ports are accessible, you have to use an HTTP proxy, which allows to tunnel SIP signaling & RTP communication. A free service which is known to work comes from realTunnel (BEAWARE: proprietary solution, binary-only program, Ekiga developers makes no guarantee on this): http://www.paradial.com/download/realtunnel-nat-sip-traversal.html.
Ekiga has ENUM support. See technical details for technical details on how ENUM works.
If you call a SIP URL without a region (i.e. without a @) Ekiga will try an ENUM lookup. You have to start the phone number with the country code, i.e. 49... for Germany, 32... for Belgium, etc. So you can enter sip:43780004711 to reach the Austrian ENUM test number.
The ENUM trees which are queried are hard-coded in the source code file ptclib/enum.cxx. They are: e164.voxgratia.net, e164.org and e164.arpa. e164.arpa is the so-called "golden tree", i.e. the official ENUM tree.
This page was last modified on 15 February 2016, at 13:41.
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