Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] Why does wireshark not recognize my RTP packets in the cor
From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:27:41 -0700

On Sep 10, 2009, at 4:08 AM, André Loddenkemper wrote:

The problem is: Wireshark just recognizes those packets as "UDP" and not as "RTP" as it should be.

By default, Wireshark only recognizes RTP packets if some previous packets set up an RTP session.

In the protocol preferences for RTP (Edit -> Preferences, and select RTP under Protocols), there's a "Try to decode RTP outside of conversations" preference; if you turn it on, the RTP dissector will look at otherwise-undecoded UDP packets and see whether they look enough like RTP packets, in its opinion, to treat them as RTP packets.

The heuristic it uses is a bit weak (I'm not sure there are any stronger ones), so it's not on by default, as it might mis-identify traffic as RTP that's not RTP traffic.