The VideoLAN Forums

This kind of audio file is use by Nortel to record phone messages on an IMAP like server.
These phone messages can be read via CallPilot, a software from Nortel, compatible on Windows with Outlook an a couple of other mail softwares.
With proper IMAP account configurations of Outlook, phone messages can be received (.vbk files) and listen by the user.

There is no CallPilot for Mac OS X systems. It seem, at first glance, that in the days before X... a CallPilot compatible with Mac via Eudora and Netscape has been.

I try to configure Mail (Apple) with the proper server and account infos, no luck.
I try to configure Entourage with the exact same infos with success. A new "mailbox" with many tests messages (as join files). But no way to listen when clicking on them.

Having VLC able to read these .vbk audio files may help offices with Macs to have the same options as Windows users.
Other possibilities are;
M. Job can give a call to Nortel to give a kick for a Mac OS X compatible CallPilot,
VLC can be paid to do that job ,
Someone at Nortel can wake up,
None of the above we forget that.

Have a good day all of you!

Are there some specifications ?

I can email an example of one if needed.

If you can, upload to ftp://ftp.videolan.org/incoming/ and report back the filenames (please upload file and same named text file that explains the issue).

Hello,

I am also in the same boat as AdamRiggins.

Nortel does NOT make a file player for Mac.

I have uploaded a sample file to your FTP upload section. The file name is Voice.vbk .

Hopefully VLC can tweak their player to suit these files!

Give us a specification!

I'm not sure what specifications you are looking for.

We would like VLC to play .vbk files.

I have also uploaded it here.

http://www.engineeredautomotive.com/Voice.vbk

any updates?

Yeah, no specification, no open source codec => no playback.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you mean by specification? I can try to provide more info, but I need to know what you are looking for.

Specification in this case means some kind of documentation that says how file should be decoded. Reverse engineering is usually too painful operation so devs try to avoid that.

Great,

I've posted in a Nortel forum and perhaps they can help out.

http://community.nortel.com/go/message/6826#6826

I work for a large (9000+ employee) govt. organisation - We use nortel for our voice messages and the vbk files get sent out in an email.

It would be good if users could open these files with VLC so we don't have to deploy that horrid nortel software to every machine!

Well, the problem is that you need someone to reverse engineer the format then.

Looks like it's been done recently by a contract programmer, at a cost of slightly less than $1K:
http://www.odesk.com/jobs/Reverse-Engin ... 1679f3f6bb

It would appear that anyone who cares enough to spend $1000 could get this open-sourced.

I'd also very much like to see a reverse engineering of this file format (which appears to be some kind of G711 compressed package)

Recently messed around attempting to do some conversions of vbk files and had some luck converting them with audacity. Imported as raw with Encoding: U-Law, Byte order: Little-endian, Channels: Mono, Sample rate: 8000 Hz and my files were sounding normal. This was with an old BCM50 phone system no idea if they have multiple formats for their vbk files for different applications or how to detect it in their header. Know this topic is old but it helped me when attempting to do some conversions.