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Speex Joins Xiph To Bring Free VOIP To The Masses
xercist writes "Xiph.org
has added a new project to their plate of goodies-
Speex.
Speex is an audio codec specifically for, you guessed it, voice.
It has integration with Xiph's
OGG
container, but is mainly being used right now for VOIP.
There is currently an XMMS
plugin
available, and is also supported by
LinPhone,
OpenH323,
and
GnomeMeeting.
Asterisk PBX
is working on adding support.
This is not a new project -- Jean-Marc Valin has been hard at work writing
the codec for quite a while now. However, Jean-Marc is now a full-fledged
member or the Xiph.org team, and in celebration, Speex beta one is being
released.
Xiph.org has brought you
(or is currently working on bringing you)
Vorbis,
Tremor,
Theora,
Tarkin,
Icecast2,
cdparanoia,
now Speex,
and, of course, the
Moaning Goat Meter.
This is a LOT to do, so please
donate
to show your support."
Is this akin to the compression they use for cell phone signals (which makes listening to someone's radio over a cell phone so crappy)?
evil adrian
It's good to see the xiph people to bring to the masses such advanced projects - and under a free fashion. I hope the big companies start to take seriously all the Xiph's work by supporting their projects into commercial products, such as hardware OGG players and such.
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
With VOIP I can connect to my dialup ISP from out of town without paying long distance fees.
Why does everyone insist we need to do absoultely everything over TCP/IP? We already have this interesting thing called the telephone network that works quite well at this very thing. Sorry for the trollish retort, but it seems like we should solve other very real *problems* with software, instead of going out of the way to propose yet another trendy TCP/IP enabled whatever.
Not to discourage, but it won't really matter to the masses until there's a native, easy-to-use Windows client.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Ha, Lizardman, you fag, just shut up.
How do they support piracy? I'm not familiar with the issue, please go into more detail...
sig.
I've been playing around with speex when i was working on an audio conferencing. It's a simple api, and the audio quality comes out okay for voice too. (unless you try sending music through, then it really just craps out)
If only I could get the windows side of the cross-platform audio caputre stuff so nice.
New worlds are not born in the vacuum of abstract
ideas, but in the fight for daily bread --Rudolf Rocke
They don't, it's a troll, stop by the vorbis channel yourself and see.
Remember those Free VOIP Dot-com Bomb company??????? They Spent and wasted Mils of VC Dollars in R&D trying to produce the Technology for VOIP and all of these companies Failed went Down under!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Once again Open Source to the Recue!!!!
I didn't even know that Monty had also done cdparanoia until recently. Great coder.
Here's to Xiph -- singlehandledly taking on the tech-media companies (Real/Apple/MS and tons of failed companies) and steadily gaining ground.
We've had propriatary media formats for a long time. (Incidently, propriatary file formats are one of the strongest weapons incumbents have against upstart open source projects). This is a big movement that's starting to cascade, with more companies joining the Xiph bandwagon daily (and little interest in the MPEG4 people).
May we never see th
I already donated US$7.50 to xiph (10 times the price of an mp3 decoder). It's really not much, but it seemed about right in proportion to the other software I use (especially since I only use xiph's products for my desktop, not servers). I know xiph is working hard, but I feel more of a debt to the creators of linux, gnu, postgres, apache, exim, debian, python, perl, openbsd (I only use their openssh, but that's important), and all the other great projects I didn't mention (and those aren't necessarily in order).
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
Get some better names for your projects! If a 12 year old is embarrassed to say "OGG Tarkin" aloud, then you're not going to sell it outside of the hardcore open source geek community. And I know, you're not trying to make money, but I'm betting you'd even win some mindshare if you were willing to, say:
I'm hoping someone else will be kind enough to hire a professional web designer for Xiph, and maybe even a domain name that people could pronounce or remember. Dig deep, folks. I know it's a recession, but every little bit helps.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Speex? What a terrible name for a codec. It'll never gain widespread acceptance. I mean, hell, it sounds like an English word.
Winamp != Windows Media Player
So many jokes... so little time...
Why the streaming server for Speex, jroar, is not listed?
Correct link here
Im developing Goatse Over IP, a new way to send goatse.cx to anybody. Please visit this site to find out more. It uses loip. (Loopback over IP)
The badly dated Half-Life engine still has one feature that is more powerful than anything in UT2k3: and that's voice over ip, in-game, mostly used in Counter-Strike.
UT2k3 already uses OGG for its music -- and I recall reading a UT2k3 developer plan file that states the wish for voice-over-ip, but basically they were waiting for someone in the open-source world to do all the work.
Why just hit a few buttons to say, "Ownage!" when they can hear your true compressed, overly nasal-sounding voice say it -- or perhaps more insulting, filthier things?
This is never going to amount to a mass of anything (save vapor) if it's not applied as a standard and supported in hardware. G.721, G.729, GSM, and aLaw and uLaw are pretty established codec's that in supporting, you can communicate with probalby 99% of VoIP equipment out there....
It's very sad that speex will never make it as a viable codec for VoIP. Perhaps it would be beneficial for an orginasation such as the FSF to support these open sourc codec's efforts to lobby and apply for standards support so that future products might actually use them one day -- epseically in an application such as VoIP where interoperability is often the number one concern in establishing large scale acceptance.
~GoRK
Or, he places sensible limits on his circle of friends.
Don't worry. He was just joking (partly).
I've had major problems just in getting good sound into a computer. The environment is too electrically noisy just to connect a microphone. It is better if the digitizing is done outside the general purpose computer.
Also, I've found no good applications for recording sound to a disk file.
While udp certainly is the right choice for transmitting the actual audio data (low latency etc.) this alone doesn't make a complete telephony protocol.
One standard used often today for call management (listen for incoming calls, register possible recipients etc.) is H323, the one netmeeting and gnomemeeting, among many others, use. Unfortunately H323 does a very bad job when it comes to transmitting data through firewalls, nat-gateways or proxies (typical environment in many companies today) since it contains parts which choose arbitrary high ports for connection. You can work around this by installing e.g. OpenH323 Proxy on your gateway, but usually you'll need your systems administrator to do that - and it is pretty likely that he/she will refuse to do that for security reasons or simply because it can become quite tricky to set up a stable working H323 proxy/gateway (lots of configuration work).
BTW i've heard that some firewall constructors have basically given up on that matter and simply open all ports when they detect some client intends to do netmeeting.
time is a funny concept
"Speex Joins Xiph To Bring Free VOIP To The Masses"
--is a little hard to read. It looks like a line from Jabberwocky.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Note to moderators: this is the most insightful part of posting. The rest of the ranty nonsense, please change it.
I love the fact that a good, Free Software voice codec is out there, and here are my reasons:
1) Ham Radio. The Tucson Amateur Packet Radio organization is working on experimental digitized voice over amateur radio applications, and a couple of venders (mostly Kenwood) are offering radios that have this ability. Right now, TAPR are looking at using DVSI's IMBE vocoder, which is QUITE expensive and VERY not-Free. The availability of a Free codec would greatly improve the availabilty of this protocol.
2) Currently, The Association of Public-Safety Officials (APCO) (the folks who define the specs for the radios used by police, fire, and government) have defined the current digital trunked radio standard, APCO Project 25 as using DVSI's IMBE vocoder. While this is licensed under a Reasonable And Non-Discrimitory license, if you want to license the IMBE vocoder for a P-25 project, you will cough up US$100,000.00 for the privilege (I know firsthand, as the company I work for has done this). Uniden, Radio Shack, and other scanner companies are looking into putting this into their scanners, so they have had to cough it up as well. A Free vocoder would allow anybody to build a product with this capability in it - you could even use a scanner and your sound card to decode the Phase 1 C4FM format signals.
Like so many other things, a Free Software tool to do these things would greatly accelerate the industry. I hope Xiph does well.
www.eFax.com are spammers
thats because the company needs to pay for all it's equipment somehow. I think VoIP could affect the integrity of our phone system. It's a great idea to be able to talk to friends and family cheaper but who knows what could happen.
IIRC, NetMeeting allows you to plug in extra codecs.
Do plug-in codecs have to be signed by Windows Hardware Qualification Labs in order not to bark at the user for using a "potentially unreliable codec"?
Will I retire or break 10K?
In related news, Qwixm released Zblik today, the latest server in the Foogark series, designed to smoothly integrate with the operating systems Njiimakiwup, Ueltwvom, and GNU/Zzyzx.
Currently trillian pro supports plugins and all the information to make a pc->pc call is there.
....
Why doesnt someone take the openh323 libraries (that are already a nice packed dll) and write a nice interface for trillian with it.
I know i'd certainly be intrested in it.
On another note what good _SIMPLE_ hardware is there out there for these applications eg pc->pc->phone...
dial an ip and ring a household line etc.
or the ability to dial a local number without going through the voip stuff etc.
like whats the end-user solutions like these days?
FTP chooses arbitrary inbound ports for non-passive data connections as well, and just about every firewall sold today supports stateful packet inspection to open up the TCP (src,port,dest,port) quad for the duration of the transfer.
"Professional" firewalls support the same kind of sniffing for H.323, according to a quick survey I did last year, and it's easy to set up. The biggest difference in deployment is that we already have a high degree of trust/dependence on TCP through firewalls, and much less warm fuzzy feelings about UDP.
Just remember: it doesn't matter whether it's secure; you have to convince other people that it's secure.
If you must drink soda, do it along with a meal. But don't drink it all the time. Wean yourself off it - sugary things are for children, so unless you still qualify, you should be developing an adult palate. Yeah, it's difficult to do that, in the U.S...
Whoa, now there's a nice little attribute, really.
I have logs myself where Emmett Plant even states that there's no harm in copyright piracy, that it in fact helps everyone.
He even states that people can talk about piracy and even about pirating stuff so long as they don't trade in the channel itself.
I have logs just as well, so thanks.
And to clarify, I think that the CTEA is bad, and I hope Eldred gets it struck down. If you even bother to realize things, you'll see that even Lessig and Eldred *support* copyright, just not the CTEA and DMCA, just like I publicly stated in #Vorbis.
And yes, I got banned because I didn't support piracy. Let me repeat that: You get banned from Xiph's channel if you do not apprecate piracy.
And I never stated that the only reason copyright is sacred is because it's a law, but I did say that piracy is against the law. If you wish to break it, you should also accept the consequences of breaking said law.
Now, about that lying?
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
There is open source code for tons of the traditionally G.7xx CODECs around. The issues many of them require licensing various peoples patents. A casual look at speex would make me think that it is quite likely to infringe someone's CELP patents. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? It's really cool to see something like speex happening but there are a few other things that you might want to think about.
t -ilbc-codec-00.txt.
A /
Global IP Sound put out a codec for voice called iLBC. It is specifically designed to avoid infringing known patents. It's sound quality vs. packet loss is very good for IP systems. This is being standardized by the IETF. All the source code is open source and in the draft which you can find at http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-av
Sun has a free implementation of CCITT compression types G.711, G.721 and G.723 at ftp://ftp.cwi.nl/pub/audio/ccitt-adpcm.tar.gz. This is just a free implementation - it does not give you a license to the patents.
Various people including Cisco have been working with the license holders of G.729 IPR to make it available for "pre-commercial" systems, developers, and education. http://www.vovida.org/applications/downloads/G729
Hey AC, don't take is so seriously. I was just showing that there are sensible alternative points of view.
So why did you previously say they support piracy if you are now willing to confess that they forbid it expressly? From your post, it seems Emmett only supports talking about it. Was it really worth lying about, if you're only going to refute yourself one post later?
Yes, about that lying! This is as good an example as any I've seen:
Since you seem to be doing an outstanding job of debunking your own lies, why don't you go ahead and post to us what Emmett really said in those IRC logs when you were badgering him in /msg, right before you got banned?
GnomeMeeting uses fixed ports, and not random ports, moreover it is now able to do IP translations, port forwarding is the only thing to do to be able to place calls from behind a NAT gateway.
OGG MAKE MORE OGGs! Ogg live forever!
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
What will happen is that telcos, which own almost all of the Internet infrastructure, will replace phone revenues with bandwidth costs. This will likely take the form of a reduced rate of bandwidth devaluation, unless the VoIP transition is done so quickly they are forced to stop subsidizing Internet infrastructure costs.
People should keep in mind that most of the telcos managed to nearly bankrupt themselves. If a mass-exodus of the phone networks occur, bandwith will get expensive really fast before the businesses will let themselves collapse.
Thx.
I have tried to donate some money to Xiph.org before using Paypal. But it seems that Paypal did not want me to donate to Xiph. I kept getting hit by blank pages when I submitted forms. I tried on different days, but same problems.
Maybe many others too experienced the same problems and eventually gave up.
I didn't refute myself.
Emmett Plant distinctly stated that he supports piracy, but you can't trade it on their channel. You can talk about trading, you can talk about what you pirate, and the Xiph people are usually in the discussions with them.
That doesn't refute anything. He fully supports it, just doesn't want to have anything bad happen to his channel at all.
If you do not believe me, it's irc.xiph.org, channel #Vorbis. Go ahead and discuss piracy, and see whether or not they're "against it".
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
...or is Xiph spreading itself rather thinly these days?
Ogg Vorbis got out the door, and then it was Tarkin/Icecast2/Theora/Helix and now Speex.
They're committed to so many projects right now I wonder if any of them will be completed in the next 5 years...
Theora (my particular favorite) got announced at the beginning of July. The Theora mailing lists' traffic is still made up mostly of people wanting to ask about using VP3 with Microsoft(tm) Windows(tm) Directshow(tm) and such, with only a few brief (but informative) bursts of discussion actually relevant to Ogg Theora. After nearly 3 months of near-silence (not counting the non-Theora related VP3 questions) on the mailing lists and CVS repository, the first Alpha release of Ogg Theora popped up out of nowhere (not even MENTIONED on the mailing lists!)...and quickly returned to silence again. I've actually played with the Alpha code, and it makes me very hopeful for the final product - it's currently unoptimized, but even so its current speed seems about comparable with mjpegtools mpeg2 encoder, and the quality seems quite good at e.g. 300kbps/640x480/29.97fps. With all of the other projects being collected under the Xiph umbrella right now, though, I wonder how much developer time and attention will be available to keep it going...
(It MAY be that, with both codecs involved in Theora being essentially finished, they figure all they really need to do is finalize the specifications, and then spend a little time doing some optimization and they're done, and since there's almost 9 months to go until their projected 1.0 release date that it can wait...Judging by the quality of the first alpha [and thanks go to Monty at Xiph.org and Dan Miller of On2 for getting things that far along!], they may be right...provided there's time to come back and finish up between the other projects...)
I'm strongly in favor of every one of the projects they've taken on so far, I just wish it didn't seem like new projects were being added faster than existing ones are being worked on...
Okay, enough whining from me. I'll go back to quietly waiting impatiently again now...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Well, see, this is what makes you a hypocrite. Emmett, and every other single person on the server, has done absolutely nothing more illegal or immoral than what you've done... TALKED about it, and expressed distaste with the current copyright law. People who actually engage in the deed, if I've been told correctly, are warned and then removed from the server.
So who at xiph.org is "supporting" piracy any more than you? Nobody. Once they "support" it with xiph.org's resources, they are no longer welcome there. Since YOU are no longer welcome there, I'm led to believe that you're a greater liability to the xiph.org organization than anyone still there.
I understand a bit of emotion-based patriotism in the US after 9-11, but criticizing the government for making dumb laws IS still legal in the US, isn't it?
http://www.speex.org/download/
From 0.0.1-0.0.8 in four minutes!
You're lying. I've never said that. Ever. If I have, quote me and prove me wrong.
As a writer, as a musician, I don't support 'piracy.' I release everything I do under open and/or free licenses, and for those licenses to count for anything, copyright law must be enforced. People who use and support Open Source and Free Software must respect other people's copyrights, lest the licenses on the copyrighted works they release be ignored.
I have had enough of your childish and ridiculous behavior, and I am tired of your personal attacks. If you want to debate law for hours on end, maybe we should start with defamation of character, where you have publically accused me with aiding and abetting criminals on this forum and others.
I will not hesitate to use the legal power and authority at my disposal to stop your intended harm to myself and the companies with which I am affiliated. Consider yourself warned.
Emmett Plant
It's true, it's all true... at least three ships have been sunk and two Bahaman-registry cruise liners set afire and left to drift in the Atlantic. And all we've managed to pillage so far is some bloody silverware and a goddamned shuffleboard set. Emmett hasn't even found a decent lounge chair.
But seriously, we 'support piracy' because we regularly talk about how copyright has gotten whacked so far out of balance that it's in danger of furthering only a corporate bottom line? We kick people out for trading because that's an immediate liability. We kick people out when they conclusively hurt the ability to use the channel for development coordination. And we've kicked one guy out for being an annoying compulsive liar.
But to suggest that we should crack down on the very UNAMERICAN practice of discussing what's on our minds? Please. Don't be an ass. And don't put words in our mouths, nothing pisses me off more.
Monty
What Junky191 probably meant is TCP/IP as a protocol suite.
The entire suite of IP, UDP and TCP protocols were collectively named as TCP/IP by its designers. So when you say VOIP over TCP/IP, it just means that VOIP uses protocols in the TCP/IP suite as opposed to say X.25 or ATM or IBM SNA.
That's why the transport layer should incorporate forward error correction.
I don't know about what TAPR is doing, but I do know that in APCO-25, there's about as much FEC as there is voice data - just about 1 bit of error correction for every bit of voice data.
And with all the block convolution and CRC and so on, you pretty much have to chuck a bus through the signal before it starts to cough.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I think the saving grace will be the difficulty in doing differential pricing for 'Long Distance Phone Call' packets and all the other kinds of packets. (Which is essentially what the telcos are able to do now thanks to the installed base of POTS equipment in 99% of homes).
Not to mention, unless you are arguing that the phone co's hold monopolies over net access (admittedly not SO far-fetched in many urban areas), then the notion that they can unilaterally raise the price of said access is mistaken.
I would put the following questions to you: Why should the cable company up its rates for high-speed access significantly when users start using their net access to conduct phone conversations, especially when these data streams are negligible in the kbps department? They don't need to. How then could the phone companies recoup lost long-distance revenue by upping the cost of DSL? They couldn't; they'd just lose customers to cable.
Most likely scenario? USF (fund subsidizing POTS access for all) gets bigger and gets applied to net access. Sounds like an OK solution to me...
Okay I see in your original post that you claim the telcos own the 'Internet Infrastructure', and that therefore they can recoup costs via bandwidth charges. You imply that any end-user savings in long distance charges will be offset by these rate increases being passed along. Even if (big IF) the telcos were in a position to price bandwidth monopolistically, the argument that the end user will see no benefit only holds if bandwidth costs are a significant part of the cost of residential net access.
It's my understanding that most of the $49.95 Verizon charges for DSL and Time Warner charges for Cable goes to something other than the bandwidth charges. It seems reasonable to assume that Customer service, billing, advertising and maintaining the last mile or two is the real cost of high speed net access. And as I mentioned in the previous post, these costs shouldn't go up with the addition of a few more kbps of voice traffic.
First off, I'm a friend of Liz's, he didn't ask me to write this, he'll probably be pissed at me when I finds out I've done so, but I felt I needed to pitch in before this got out of hand..
If there's one thing on the net that's as or even more abused than copyright, it's defamation suits...
I've seen a bit of the logs from Lizardman - I'd want to see more before I really make up my mind.. I've the question asked "where's the harm?" I'll ask the same question here... "Where's the harm?" If anyone has been damaged here it's Liz, who has been quite thourougly slammed...
You apparently had a fairly lively debate going, and while I only saw bits of it, it seems to have broken down in to matter of both sides agreeing the law was bad, but a wide diffrence of opinion over what behavior people find acceptable before it's changed.
On that matter Lizardman's an absolutist.. you don't break the law -period- civil disobedience isn't a get out of jail free card, the RIAA's dinosaur buisness models non withstanding -if it's banned from a channel it's -banned- you shouldn't be disscussing what people have swapped or their experinces with trading have been - keep it completly hypothetical, or your supporting it by an act of willfull blindness to refrences to actual instances.. I don't know if I agree wholely or not but it's his -opinion-
Personally it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I see people talking about what they've downloaded somewhere, even if they're not trading in channel, I've been ripped off once too many times to do file trading myself, even if I -know-I could find what I'm interested in. It leaves a worse taste in Lizardman's mouth, that's it.. His opinions are NOT worth what you're proposing, especially after you've made a vigorus denial of the claims here..
In the end you won't live or die on Lizardman's pronouncements from his soapbox, you'll live or die on your own actions and efforts...
That's funny, because your ruling on your channel was that as long as people didn't trade on the channel, they could talk about what they pirated and that they have pirated.
That was *YOUR* ruling, in public, Emmett.
That's also supporting piracy, even if you don't do it yourself, you're saying it's perfectly okay that people talk about their own acts.
So Xiph has come to this, eh? If you talk bad about Xiph, you get lawsuits?
And you want people to take you seriously?
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
That was *YOUR* ruling, in public, Emmett.
That's also supporting piracy, even if you don't do it yourself, you're saying it's perfectly okay that people talk about their own acts.
Absolutely correct. I do not condone copyright violation, but people can talk about anything they like. See, the problem here is that you think that I am 'supporting piracy' for letting people 'get away' with talking about violating other people's copyrights, and that is absolutely ridiculous.
Claiming that someone is 'supporting piracy' by allowing people to discuss copyright violation is like claiming that a crime reporter 'supports murder.'
So Xiph has come to this, eh? If you talk bad about Xiph, you get lawsuits?
No. You have come forth and accused me of committing a crime, i.e. supporting copyright violation. I am not a collaborator or accomplice to crime, which is your accusation. I'm just letting you know that it's a serious accusation to make, and can cause you a lot of problems if you intend to keep this stupid jihad going.
If you really think I'm an accomplice to crime, you have a moral obligation to report it to the police. Please do so; It would be wonderfully damning to have your ridiculous accusation as a matter of written public record.
Emmett Plant
No. You have come forth and accused me of committing a crime, i.e. supporting copyright violation.
What crime? Last I looked there was a civil tort for "contributory copyright infringement", but that's not "support"...
If you're going to be a stickler for terminology on issues like the use of the term 'piracy', at least be consistant about it..
Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't,
don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck.
-- Joseph Heller, "God Knows"
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