Rxfax and ECM - multi pages faxes not received

Having a problem where single page faxes are received fine but multi-page faxes abort during reception of the second page. If I switch off ECM on the source fax machine (HP OJ5610) then the fax is received correctly.

I’m not convinced that it is purely an ECM problem as I can send as many single page faxes as I like and they are all received correctly. It seems to be something to do with the end of page marker.

Asterisk 1.4
spandsp 0.0.4

Sorry forgot to add:

libtiff 3.8.2

After some more tests it does seem to be something to do with the page break.

On a panasonic fax two attempts to send a 4 page fax resulted in an error and just the first page received with the sender getting an error. The third attempt all four pages came through OK.

On a brother fax all pages sent/received OK.

On an HP OJ5610 it aborts after the first page with a reported incompatibility error. rxfax does not receive anything. If ECM is switched off on the HP all pages are sent OK. Single page faxes are OK regardless of the ECM setting.

Is the Fax arriving on a VOIP channel or on a TDM channel?

VOIP and fax don’t mix.

It’s a genuine digium PRI card running EUROISDN.

Span 1: WCT1/0 “Digium Wildcard E100P E1/PRA Card 0” HDB3/CCS/CRC4 ClockSource

I can only suggest that you check this page.

voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+ … swithAster

As far as fax machines go, it has been observed that newer faster fax machines tend to have more problems with Asterisk as a fax server.

Frankly, I wouldn’t use Asterisk as a fax server. I would purchase a proper fax receive card, and license some good fax server software. Asterisk isn’t the best choice.

Hylafax hylafax.org might be a better choice.

Thanks for the pointer, the anoying thing is that we had it working on an old Asterisk V1.0 box until we upgraded it!! I know others have got it working and that ECM should be handled in the later versions of SPANDSP however it may be that we need to go back to older versions of the code.

I have also some fax problems afther upgrading to version 1.4.11 with 0.0.4pre9 from version 1.2 and spandsp 0.03 with no problems.

A lot of faxes are not recieved, there is only a 8 byte file in the fax-spool directory.