Cannot merge calls on recorded phones

[kylebrogers]

I have a group of 6 phones that have 6 shared lines.  We'll call them phones A-F and extensions 1001-1006.  All 6 phones have all 6 shared lines on them.  All phones are 9971s with BiB enabled.  

This group's calls are constantly recorded.  The recording software uses an application user to kick up the built-in-bridge in each phone to bridge the recording software into the call.  This all works great.

The problem is that, sometimes, one of these users needs to merge two calls together.  For example, a person may call them on 1001 and another person may call them on 1002.  They need to merge these two people (along with their self) into a conference call.  When I hit the "Active Calls" button I can scroll down to the 2nd call that I want to bring into the conversation but as soon as I highlight that call and hit the "Conference" softkey, I get a message stating "Unable to Set Up Conference".  My assumption is that this is due to the fact that the bridge is already in use by the recording software.  

All phones have an MRGL/MRG that has the software conference bridges of the Pub and Sub in them. Why is it not falling back to this to run the 3-phone conference while the BiB bridges off to the recording device?

[Brian Meade]

IP Phones will not use the BiB for conferencing.  They'll only use resources from the MRGL.  The problem you may be seeing is due to codec lock.  If one of those calls is G.729, the phone will lock the codec to G.729 due to recording and then you won't be able to use the software conference bridges in CUCM and you'll need a hardware conference bridge.

Enable web access on the phones and then use the phone's webpage to look at the streaming statistics to see what codec is negotiated for the original calls.  You may need to play with your region configurations to get G.711/G.722 everywhere so that you can use the software conference bridges on the Pub/Sub.