Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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?"
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.
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
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
Because my telco company charges me 5c/min for calling a city I can SEE from my backyard on a clear day.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
It's late and I'm too stoned to be posting but isn't the migration of every electronic form of communication a good thang? Then comes mythical intuitive GUIs, and finally integration in cross-realtional dbs.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
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)
TCP/IP is not referred as just TCP, it's the name given to the suit of protocols that makes the Internet happen, namely TCP and UDP, and IP, ICMP and others on different layers.
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
Voice over IP doesn't send voice data over TCP, it uses UDP. UDP isn't complicated at all - it just gives you a way to uniquely identify a machine and say "send this data to it." It doesn't even guarantee delivery of the data. It's probably the best, most accepted way of sending addressed, digital data over wires.
Now, imagine you're a company that's just put an office up. Would you rather install two sets of wires to each desk (ethernet and phone network), one of which requires you to get a licensed contractor in if you need work done on it? Or a single set of wires which can be maintained by the people who run your computers?
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
It doesn't even guarantee delivery of the data.
I believe it says it all when it comes to the difference between VOIP and real telephone service, which usually has a guaranteed below 10^-4 failure rate on a fixed line.
If my life depended on it, I wouldn't trust VOIP.
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.
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.
Yes!
Generally voice is sampled at 8kHz because it generally ranges from around 200Hz to 4kHz and Nyquiest suggests we need a digital sampling rate of twice the highest frequency.
The reason music sounds crappy is that in a well designed system you will loose all the audio components above 4kHz, and in a badly designed system they will manifest themselves as other lower frequencies.
Now this *does not* mean that this codec is a bad codec - merely that's it's one optimised for a specific task.
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
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.
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
...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