Skip to main content

VoIP calls encoded with SILK: from RTP to WAV, update

Three and a half years ago (which really sounds like a lot of time!) I was working with a VoIP infrastructure using SILK. As it often happens to server-side developers/integrators, you have to prove whether the audio provided by a client or to a client is correctly encoded :-)

Wireshark is able to decode, and play, G.711 streams, but not SILK (or Opus - more on this later). So I thought of having my own tool handy, to generate a WAV file for a PCAP with RTP carrying SILK frames.

The first part requires extracting the SILK payload and writing it down into a bistream file. Then you have to decode the audio using the SILK SDK decoder, to get a raw audio file. From there to a WAV file it is very easy.

As I tried to describe in this previous post, I had to reverse engineer the test files contained in the SDK, to see what a SILK file looked like.

Since the SILK payload is not constant, all that was needed was to insert 2 Bytes with the length of the following SILK frame. At the beginning of the file you have to add a header containing "#!SILK_V3", and voilà.

This is accomplished by silk_rtp_to_bistream.c (from https://github.com/giavac/silk_rtp_to_bitstream), a small program based on libpcap that extracts the SILK payload from a PCAP and writes it properly into a bistream file.

Build the binary with:

gcc silk_rtp_to_bitstream.c -lpcap -o silk_rtp_to_bitstream

(you'll need libpcap-dev installed)

Create the bistream with:

./silk_rtp_to_bitstream input.pcap silk.bit

Now you can decode, using the SILK SDK, from bitstream into raw audio with:

$SILK_SDK/decoder silk.bit silk.raw

Raw audio to WAV can be done with sox:

sox -V -t raw -b 16 -e signed-integer -r 24000 silk.raw silk.wav

This works fine with single channel SILK at 8000 Hz.


More to come: an update on how to accomplish the same but for Opus.


Popular posts from this blog

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/ice-negotiation . This post in my personal blog is a way to ensure it doesn't get lost. There is nothing service-specific in it, I've made only minor edits and I hope it can be a good technical reference on the topic. WebRTC is a set of protocols that allow applications, typically running on Web browsers, to exchange media (audio, video, data) with other entities. Before media can flow, however, the WebRTC entities need to discover what type of connection is possible, and among the possible connections, what’s the best to be used. This needs to happen as fast as possible, so that users can perceive the service as instantaneous as possible. WebRTC includes protocols like STUN and TURN that are designed to facilitate the establishment of connections when a direct connection is not possible. The typical case is a computer inside a home or o...

Troubleshooting TURN

  WebRTC applications use the ICE negotiation to discovery the best way to communicate with a remote party. I t dynamically finds a pair of candidates (IP address, port and transport, also known as “transport address”) suitable for exchanging media and data. The most important aspect of this is “dynamically”: a local and a remote transport address are found based on the network conditions at the time of establishing a session. For example, a WebRTC client that normally uses a server reflexive transport address to communicate with an SFU. when running inside the home office, may use a relay transport address over TCP when running inside an office network which limits remote UDP targets. The same configuration (defined as “iceServers” when creating an RTCPeerConnection will work in both cases, producing different outcomes.

debian - Managing maintainer scripts for packages with multple .debs

If you've ever installed a package from command line on Linux, you must have noticed two main prompts related to package configuration: one asking what to do with installed configuration files with local changes, and one providing feedback right after the installation/upgrade/removal/purge has completed. Under Debian the latter was most probably the postinst script, one of the Package Maintainer Scripts which is executed after installation and configuration. These diagrams are very useful to understand what happens to the Maintainer Scripts in different circumstances: first installation, upgrade, removal, purge. Their name is probably self-explanatory: preinst , postinst , prerm , postrm . Each of them takes zero or more arguments depending on the scenario. It can help to understand that those are really just scripts executed by dpkg - and typically they are shell scripts, sometimes with interactive prompts. If you're building your own packages, you surely already h...