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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."
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
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)
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?
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.
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.
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