"Description of the update for Communicator 2007 R2: July 2009"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969695/
"Video frames are not displayed in Office Communicator 2007 R2 on a Windows XP-based computer"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971846/
(BTW, I'd like to thank Michael Melling for spotting those links, and for helping with the testing that I describe below.)
Before the update, with Office Communicator versions v3.5.6907.0 or v3.5.6907.34, on Windows XP, after setting QoSEnabled to 1, you find audio continues to work fine, but video fails. Most of the time we just got a black video windows, sometimes it was a grey window, and sometimes a frozen image.
Using OCS's "Monitoring Server Reports" you can see whats going wrong. Click the "User Call List" link, and then filter by one of the users in the call, and this will give you a detailed statistical report of all finished calls. For the Video Stream you will see a "Packet loss Rate" of about 60% !
Office Communicator, with QoSEnabled, works fine on Vista and Windows 7, without this 'July' update. I think that Microsoft must have done the majority of their testing with their latest operating systems, and have only recently got around to testing with Windows XP.
We have been battling this problem for a couple of weeks, so this fix comes just in time! In trying to investigate what was goingwrong, we have learned a great deal, so not all the time was wasted, just some!
DSCP QoS is enabled in the registry, like this:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\RTC\Transport
"QoSEnabled"=dword:00000001
.. as per these instructions:
"Enabling DSCP Marking"
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd441192(office.13).aspx
BTW, you need to exit (not just close) Office Communicator and restart it, for this registry setting to take effect.
Once Office Communicator has setup the call using SIP (over TCP), using Office Communications Server 2007 R2, all audio & video network traffic is sent directly between the two clients using RTP (Real Time Protocol) packets in UDP packets.
Using WireShark, we could see the packets being tagged correctly:
Audio - DSCP 0x28: Class Selector CS5
Video - DSCP 0x18: Class Selector CS3
BTW, these are the default values. You can change them using a group policy.
In WireShark, to just grab the audio & video traffic, use a capture filter like this:
udp and ip[1]!=0
This will match any UDP packets that have a non-zero DSCP field in the IP header.You can use the following display filters to select either Audio or Video packets:
For Audio, use:
ip.dsfield.dscp == 40
For Video, use:
ip.dsfield.dscp == 24
BTW, if you use tcpdump to capture the packets, remember that the DSCP values are multiplied by four. So use these capture filters with tcpdump:
For Audio:
ip[1]=0xA0
ip[1]=160
For Video:
ip[1]=0x60
ip[1]=96
It is very useful to be able to see the RTP headers in the packets. To do this in WireShark, right-click on any of the packets of a UDP stream, and select 'Decode As..', the select 'Transport' as RTP.
Once you have WireShark decoding the RTP header, you can see a couple of interesting fields in the header. The first is 'Payload type',and this is set as follows:
Type 97 - RT-Audio encoded redundant data
Type 111 - 'Siren' audio - used by 'LiveMeeting'
Type 114 - RTaudio (x-msrta)
Type 118 - 'Comfort Noise'
Type 121 - RTvideo (x-rtvc1)
The second interesting RTP header field is the 'Sequence number'. This is a 16-bit counter field, that increments by 1 for each packet sent in a particular stream, and is useful for detecting dropped or duplicated packets. (The sequence number seems to start at a random value.)
There is a useful feature in WireShark which will do 'Stream Anaysis..'. On WireShark v1.2.0 you will find this under the 'Telephony > RTP' menu. This will highlight where the sequence number goes wrong.
Ok, so why was the video failing, (before the 'July' update for Office Communication). We had two laptops, running Office Communicator, connected together via a HP Procurve switch,and enabled port mirroring on the switch, to a third laptop to see all network traffic. Running WireShark on the client sending video, we saw a lot more video packet, then were being received at the other end, on the receiving client. The third monitoring laptop confirmed that packets were being dropped before they emerged 'onto the wire' from the sending laptop. Looking closely at the WireShark capture from the laptop sending video, and using the 'Stream Analysis..' we saw many video packets with duplicate RTP sequence numbers! Correlating with the capture on the receiving client, we saw that any packet that had been duplicated was missing. It was not a case of just the duplicated packet being missing, but also the original packet. Thus from the point of view of the receiving packet, there was a massive level of packet loss, hence it could not display the video stream.
BTW, on Windows XP, you can use 'tcmon.exe' from the resource kit to see what QoS policies are in effect, and this confirms packet loss onthe video stream. Here are some screen shots:
Unfortunately tcmon does not run on Vista or Windows 7, which is very disapointing. Let's hope that Microsoft get around to fixing this!
BTW, if you are using Linux to priorities the audio & video traffic as it is sent into the WAN, like we are, you will find the following iptables & 'tc filters' useful to match the packets:
# Audio:
iptables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -p udp -m dscp --dscp 40 -j mark1
iptables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -p udp -m dscp --dscp-class CS5 -j mark1
tc filter add dev eth0 parent 10:0 prio 1 protocol ip u32 match ip tos 0xA0 0xff flowid 10:200
# Video:
iptables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -p udp -m dscp --dscp 24 -j mark2
iptables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -p udp -m dscp --dscp-class CS3 -j mark2
tc filter add dev eth0 parent 10:0 prio 1 protocol ip u32 match ip tos 0x60 0xff flowid 10:210
Best Regards
Nigel Smith
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