Slashdot Mirror
KT-Tech Sound Compression - Music at 32 Kbit/s
Robert Buccigrossi writes: "KT-Tech, whose wireless video compression was featured in a previous Slashdot story, has released a demo for real-time sound compression at http://www.kttech.com/. Like their video, the sound compression is symmetric and is suitable for wireless real-time communication in software. It sounds better than Windows Media and MP3 at 32 Kbit/s for music and 4 Kbit/s for voice." According to the site, "licensing KT-Tech's sound codec is easy," but I bet it's not as easy as .ogg.
You know something? Ogg, being under the BSD, is easier to license than whatever license KT Tech does. I think you are reading way too much into a line like that.
I can see applications for this beyond just the mass market. My first thought would be for carrying additioanl voice circuits over a T1 line. (Say, for carryting voice traffic between two locations in a large company.)
A T1 line suports 24 circuits, each of which has IIRC 64Kbps (ignoring RBS, etc.) Whatever. Each of these circuits can support one conversation. Using this technology, several more conversations could be carried on one circuit. (Their web site states 8Kbits for high-quality voice; 4Kbits for intelligible voice.) Even using the 8Kbit rate, that means 8 conversations could be carried on one voice circuit.
The result? A single T1 could carry 192 conversations instead of just 24. Or, put another way, get 8 T1's of voice capacity for the price of just one T1. At anywhere from $600-$1000 per T1, that adds up really fast.
Now, how long would it be until the phone company decides to replace POTS circuits with one of these? Dial-up users would find their modems capped at 8Kbits? Blech!
They added noise to all the other encodings. Don't believe me? I re-encoded their 8 kbps kts stream to 8.5 kbps rm and even after the recompression it sounds better, listen.
Deleting the files from your hard drive is one thing. Since this is targeted at wireless, I would think it would be embedded in hardware. Talk about a forced upgrade. After a year of owning the acclaimed all in one cell phone, pda, audio player, etc - you must destroy it's firmware because it contains the KT Tech sound codec. Ouch.
Has anybody else noticed that all of the .kts files are larger than the mp3 files?
.6KB larger
8kbps =
32kbps = 3.3KB larger
64kbps = 4KB larger
I know that its not a big deal with those small amounts. But, also, those demo files are pretty small. What will be difference when using larger files or streaming?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Mp3 was "targeted" as an audio codec for video files, and wasn't intended as a stand alone audio format. That didn't stop it from becoming the de facto standard music format, did it?
.ogg is a media container, like .avi, .asf, (or .mov -- Quicktime -- which is a better comparison).
.avi files. See doom9.org for more information on this (note that people have taken to giving ogg movies the extension .ogm, due to everything in the Windows world being file extension based, and their being no good all-in-one .ogg audio/video player).
Vorbis is an audio codec. You can in principle use Vorbis outside of its Ogg wrapper (there is code to do this in recent versions of NanDub, but it never really left the experimental stage).
More interestingly, you can wrap DivX video + Vorbis audio (+ subtitles, + anything else) inside an Ogg wrapper, and get a versatile, streamable replacement for
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
98% percent of telco's cost is about those lines buried into ground. Actual cost of switching equipment is minimal.
fucktard is a tenderhearted description