Wednesday 3 February 2016

Extracting Opus from a pcap file into an audible wav

From time to time I need to verify that the audio inside a trace is as expected. Not much in terms of quality, but more often content and duration.

A few years ago I wrote a small program to transform a pcap into a wav file - the codec in use was SILK.

These days I'm dealing with Opus, and I have to say things are greatly simplified, in particular if you consider opus-tools, a set of utilities to handle opus files and traces.

One of those tools, opusrtp, can do live captures and write the interpreted payload into a .opus file.
Still, what I needed was to achieve the same result but from a pcap already existing, i.e. "offline".

So I come up with a small - quite shamlessly copy&pasted - patch to opusrtc, which is now in this fork.
Once you have a pcap with an RTP stream with opus (say in input.pcap) you can retrieve the .opus equivalent (in rtpdump.opus) with:

./opusrtp --extract input.pcap

Then you can generate an audible wav file with:

./opusdec --rate 8000 rtpdump.opus output.wav

Happy decoding.

About ICE negotiation

Disclaimer: I wrote this article on March 2022 while working with Subspace, and the original link is here:  https://subspace.com/resources/i...