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."

Comments

"To the masses"?

[Wakko Warner]

Not to discourage, but it won't really matter to the masses until there's a native, easy-to-use Windows client.

- A.P.

Re:"To the masses"?

[CondeZer0]

It matters to me, and I couldn't care less about the masses or ease of use. I
care about something that works for me, and that is free of patents and other
traps.

I'm sick of people that think that "masses" are all that matters, if that was
the case we would be all running Windows, listening to boys/girls bands,
looking TV, drinking coca-cola and living in a big city.

Whatever the masses do, OGG is one of the most important projects out there to
protect my freedom of using a hight quality audio format, if you don't like it,
unlike with some other "DRM enabled" formats, you wont be obligated to use it
any time soon.

For all that I care you and all your masses can go use WMA and all it's DRM
trash, browsing AOL, listening Britney(sp?), going to the cinema to see (checks
warnerbros.com) Harry Potter, running Windows XP on your palladium enabled
Pentium 5 and living in NewYork.

I will continue using ogg, browsing the web with Mozilla, listening to
Einsturzende Neubauten and Chopin(two examples of things I have been listening
to today), looking Clockwork Orange, Cube and Totoro, running FreeBSD on my AMD
Duron, and Plan9 in my old broken Thinkpad; and living in some lost place in
the North of Sweden.

Hope you are happy living your prefabricated life in your plastic world. Hurry
or you are going to miss your daily brainwashing 4 hour sesion of TV. And don't
forget to stay well away from any book, you may learn something from them!

*sigh*

\\Uriel

Re:But...

[PinkX]

does *costs* means anything to you? Seriously, long distance calls can be very expensive, even more for people who must make them frequently (think foreign students, etc). Having the voice calls being transported over TCP/IP, using an already proven technology which covers almost the whole globe (and to some extent outside of it) reduces these costs to nearly 0, except for the VoIP hardware (gateways and such) needed, now think of the advantages to be able to do phone calls from your linux box using *free* software to anywhere in the world, for just the cost of your net link, which most of the time is flat-rated.

Re:But...

[cerenyx]

If I'm not wrong (and I may be), reliability is still an issue with VoIP: and taking the hypothetical company -- the question is whether, taking long-distance conference calls and otherwise using the telephone lines extensively for critical purposes, the company would feel more "secure" using the tried and tested analog telephone lines, as opposed to VoIP.