mp3 support - Deprecated or not?

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Hello! I was pleased to find this excellent installation guide, and even more pleased to see that there was an option for mp3 codec support:

Although I ticked the box when configuring before compiling, I’m not having much luck - it connects and then drops the call. The last thing to appear on the debug log is: 489 Bad Event

Here’s what I found:

[fromvoiper]
exten => 101,1,Answer()
same = n,Wait(1)
;same = n,Playback(/home/test/magazine.mp3) << Nope!
;same = n,ControlPlayback(/home/test/magazine.mp3) << Still nothing.
;same = n,MP3Player(/home/test/magazine.mp3) << Works, but no transport controls.
same = n,Hangup()

What I also found is that in this page from 2010 which I found by searching MP3Player, it says:

But in this page referring to Asterisk 13 it says:

[quote]MP3Player()
Synopsis
Play an MP3 file or M3U playlist file or stream.
Description
Executes mpg123 to play the given location,[/quote]

Did it come back into favour? Am I “safe” to use it? And why aren’t my mp3s playing with native controls, or appearing in the list below? Still a bit of a noob with all this, but was all going well until I got stuck here. I can always transcode if REALLY need be, but if there’s a native method that avoids that, then all the better. Transport controls (skip, like ControlPlayback) are essential. Thanks!

[code] ID TYPE NAME DESCRIPTION

  30 image      png (PNG Image)
   5 audio     g726 (G.726 RFC3551)
   3 audio     alaw (G.711 a-law)
   1 audio     g723 (G.723.1)
  19 audio    speex (SpeeX)
  20 audio    speex (SpeeX 16khz)
  21 audio    speex (SpeeX 32khz)
  23 audio     g722 (G722)
  31 video     h261 (H.261 video)
  32 video     h263 (H.263 video)
   7 audio    adpcm (Dialogic ADPCM)
  24 audio   siren7 (ITU G.722.1 (Siren7, licensed from Polycom))
  27 audio     g719 (ITU G.719)
  33 video    h263p (H.263+ video)
  34 video     h264 (H.264 video)
  18 audio     g729 (G.729A)
   8 audio     slin (16 bit Signed Linear PCM)
   9 audio     slin (16 bit Signed Linear PCM (12kHz))
  10 audio     slin (16 bit Signed Linear PCM (16kHz))
  11 audio     slin (16 bit Signed Linear PCM (24kHz))
  12 audio     slin (16 bit Signed Linear PCM (32kHz))
  13 audio     slin (16 bit Signed Linear PCM (44kHz))
  14 audio     slin (16 bit Signed Linear PCM (48kHz))
  15 audio     slin (16 bit Signed Linear PCM (96kHz))
  16 audio     slin (16 bit Signed Linear PCM (192kHz))
   2 audio     ulaw (G.711 u-law)
  17 audio    lpc10 (LPC10)
  26 audio  testlaw (G.711 test-law)
  39 audio     none (<Null> codec)
  25 audio  siren14 (ITU G.722.1 Annex C, (Siren14, licensed from Polycom))
   6 audio g726aal2 (G.726 AAL2)
  36 video      vp8 (VP8 video)
   4 audio      gsm (GSM)
  35 video    mpeg4 (MPEG4 video)
  22 audio     ilbc (iLBC)
  37  text      red (T.140 Realtime Text with redundancy)
  38  text     t140 (Passthrough T.140 Realtime Text)
  28 audio     opus (Opus Codec)
  29 image     jpeg (JPEG image)[/code]
2

I wouldn’t use MP3 as it doesn’t make sense in a telephony environment: you have to use a lot of processing power to convert it to a usable codec, then the quality is limited by that codec. It is normally better to convert offline.

However, Playback takes a file name without an extension, and tries all the supported extensions, to try and find one it can convert to the codec in use for the call.