FreeSDP - A Free SDP Implementation

FreeSDP

FreeSDP is a free implementation of SDP, the Session Description Protocol from the IETF (see RFC 2327 and draft-ietf-mmusic-sdp-new). SDP is used for multimedia session description purposes by multimedia session signaling and control protocols such as SIP, SAP, RTSP and H.323. SDP descriptions can also be conveyed over HTTP and SMTP with MIME extensions.

FreeSDP is a stand-alone C library that provides a complete set of functions for parsing and formatting SDP multimedia session descriptions. FreeSDP does not only implement the base SDP specification, but also a number of extensions. FreeSDP has been designed with minimality, security and speed in mind. Its only dependency is a standard C library. In addition, it is thread safe.

Licensing

FreeSDP is free software distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Distribution

Latest versions can be downloaded from the FreeSDP project page at Savannah. There you can find source packages as well as instructions to access the public CVS repository.

There is also a mailing list for general discussion, where suggestions, bug reports or any other comments are welcome. You can access the related resources -including a searchable archive- through the savannah web interface.

Documentation

Source packages of FreeSDP include a programmer's manual as well as an exhaustive reference manual generated through Doxygen. Both will be soon available online, as soon as the library interface becomes stable enough.

Related Work

A list of some free Session Description Protocol implementations:

• SDP Implementation & Deployment report at the IETF (beware that many of the implementations listed there are non-free).
• GNU oSIP. A SIP library implemented in C. Includes SDP parsing and negotiation facilities.
• NIST-SIP. A Java implementation of the SIP protocol that also includes SDP functionalities.
• Spar (Sdp PARser). A Java applet that converts SDP descriptions into command line options suitable for the Mbone applications. Warning: as some other Mbone tools from the UCL, it is distributed under a BSD license with the obnoxious advertising clause.