MeetMe

MeetMe is the legacy conferencing application in Asterisk that older VICIdial installations use to bridge agents with callers. Like ConfBridge, MeetMe joins multiple audio channels into a conference room, enabling call monitoring, barge-in, and three-way transfers. However, MeetMe requires DAHDI timing hardware or drivers, which adds complexity to server configuration.

How It Works in VICIdial

In MeetMe-based VICIdial installations, each active call is placed into a numbered MeetMe conference room. The agent’s phone channel and the caller’s channel are joined in this room, with VICIdial tracking the conference number for monitoring and transfer operations. Supervisors can join in listen-only mode for quality control, or in speak mode to assist agents.

MeetMe requires the DAHDI (Digium Asterisk Hardware Device Interface) kernel module to provide timing signals for audio mixing — even when no physical telephony hardware is installed. This means the server needs either a physical DAHDI timing card or the dahdi_dummy kernel module loaded. On virtual machines and cloud instances, compiling and maintaining DAHDI modules can be challenging.

The conference audio is mixed by the DAHDI driver at the kernel level, which historically provided very efficient audio processing but creates dependency on kernel-version-specific modules.

Why It Matters

MeetMe was the standard conferencing method for VICIdial for over a decade and remains in use on many production systems. However, ConfBridge has replaced it as the recommended option because ConfBridge eliminates the DAHDI timing dependency, simplifies server deployment (especially in cloud and virtual environments), and provides additional features.

If your VICIdial system still uses MeetMe, it will continue to work, but new installations should use ConfBridge. Migration from MeetMe to ConfBridge typically involves updating the Asterisk dialplan and VICIdial configuration settings. See the VICIdial setup guide for conferencing configuration details.