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

Speex sounds nice

[deathcubek]

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.

Re:But...

[Monkelectric]

Because my telco company charges me 5c/min for calling a city I can SEE from my backyard on a clear day.

Re:But...

[lpontiac]

Why does everyone insist we need to do absoultely everything over TCP/IP?

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?

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:"To the masses"?

[jmv]

(I am the Speex author) There are already at least two Windows front-ends: here and here. There may be others I'm not aware of. Note that I haven't developed of tested any of these since I don't use Windows.