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6.4 SDES: Source description RTCP packet

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6.4 SDES: Source description RTCP packet

6.4 SDES: Source description RTCP packet

 0                   1                   2                   3
 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
|V=2|P|    SC   |  PT=SDES=202  |             length            | header
+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
|                          SSRC/CSRC_1                          | chunk
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+   1
|                           SDES items                          |
|                              ...                              |
+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
|                          SSRC/CSRC_2                          | chunk
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+   2
|                           SDES items                          |
|                              ...                              |
+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

The SDES packet is a three-level structure composed of a header and zero or more chunks, each of of which is composed of items describing the source identified in that chunk. The items are described individually in subsequent sections.

version (V), padding (P), length:
As described for the SR packet (see Section 6.3.1).

packet type (PT): 8 bits
Contains the constant 202 to identify this as an RTCP SDES packet.

source count (SC): 5 bits
The number of SSRC/CSRC chunks contained in this SDES packet. A value of zero is valid but useless.

Each chunk consists of an SSRC/CSRC identifier followed by a list of zero or more items, which carry information about the SSRC/CSRC. Each chunk starts on a 32-bit boundary. Each item consists of an 8-bit type field, an 8-bit octet count describing the length of the text (thus, not including this two-octet header), and the text itself. Note that the text can be no longer than 255 octets, but this is consistent with the need to limit RTCP bandwidth consumption.

The text is encoded according to the UTF-2 encoding specified in Annex F of ISO standard 10646 [12,13]. This encoding is also known as UTF-8 or UTF-FSS. It is described in "File System Safe UCS Transformation Format (FSS_UTF)", X/Open Preliminary Specification, Document Number P316 and Unicode Technical Report #4. US-ASCII is a subset of this encoding and requires no additional encoding. The presence of multi-octet encodings is indicated by setting the most significant bit of a character to a value of one.

Items are contiguous, i.e., items are not individually padded to a 32-bit boundary. Text is not null terminated because some multi-octet encodings include null octets. The list of items in each chunk is terminated by one or more null octets, the first of which is interpreted as an item type of zero to denote the end of the list, and the remainder as needed to pad until the next 32-bit boundary. A chunk with zero items (four null octets) is valid but useless.

End systems send one SDES packet containing their own source identifier (the same as the SSRC in the fixed RTP header). A mixer sends one SDES packet containing a chunk for each contributing source from which it is receiving SDES information, or multiple complete SDES packets in the format above if there are more than 31 such sources (see Section 7).

The SDES items currently defined are described in the next sections. Only the CNAME item is mandatory. Some items shown here may be useful only for particular profiles, but the item types are all assigned from one common space to promote shared use and to simplify profile- independent applications. Additional items may be defined in a profile by registering the type numbers with IANA.


Next: 6.4.1 CNAME: Canonical end-point identifier SDES item

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6.4 SDES: Source description RTCP packet