Speex Goes 1.0, Xiph Goes 501(c)3

Emmettfish writes "Hey, folks! We've posted an announcement this morning; Speex (the free and open voice compression codec by Jean-Marc Valin) has gone 1.0, and the Xiph.Org Foundation is now officially recognized as a charitable non-profit organization by the IRS. Donate to help us write more Free Software and get a tax break. Thanks!"

Comments

Re:What's the difference between Speex and OGG?

[shish]

speex is geared to vocals, ie more detail in fewer places rather than the semi-constant bitrate needed by music

Re:What's the difference between Speex and OGG?

[pe1rxq]

Speex is a voice codec used for low bandwidth voice data (ie voip).
Ogg is a container format, you can put speex data inside an ogg file.

You probably mean Vorbis, which is an general purpose audio codec much like mp3. Most of the time vorbis data is also put into ogg files.

Jeroen

Re:This is good

[popeyethesailor]

Isnt that what Speakfreely is about ?
Also available for Unix.
CLI based, but some front-ends are available too.

Re:This is good

[cduffy]

On a related note: if there are any other active projects for a netmeeting-type application (I'm aware of Gnomemeeting, but I'd like to avoid the whole directory/ILS business, and just do simple person-to-person calls, with possible encryption if desired), please post a link.

You *are* familiar with Speak Freely, right?

Public Software Fund

[Russ Nelson]

We just went through this at the Public Software Fund. Basically, you need a good lawyer and thousands of dollars. You also need to show that nobody will get any private benefit from the publicly-funded works. You also have to show that what you're doing falls into several categories of public benefits, like scientific research, or charitable works.

But if all you want to do is have your public software project receive tax-free donations, just register with Pubsoft and add your project to the list?

Re:hmmm

[arvindn]

From your fake username, url and sig, I assume you are trolling. However, might as well clear up a point.

From the speex website:

Position regarding patents

The goal of Speex is to provide a codec that is open-source (released under the LGPL) and that can be used in open-source software. This implies that it also has to be free from patent restrictions. Unfortunately, the field of speech coding known to be a real patent minefield and to make the matter worse, each country has its own patent laws and list of granted patents so tracking them all would be next to impossible. This is why we cannot provide an absolute warranty that Speex is indeed completely patent-free.

That being said, we are doing our best to keep away from known patents and we do not patent the algorithms we use. That's about all we can do about it. If you are aware of a patent issue with Speex, please let us know.

Normally there shouldn't be any problem when you use Speex. However for the reasons explained above, if you are thinking about using Speex commercially, we strongly suggest that you have a closer look at patent issues with respect to your country. Note that this is not specific to Speex, since many "standardized" codecs have an unclear patent status (like MP3, GSM and probably others), not to mention the risks of a previously unknown patent holder claiming rights on a standardized codec long after standardization (GIF, JPEG).

Strangely I got a 404 on their website, but got the above info through the google cache.

Re:Sourceforge next?

[J. Tang]

Kind of off-topic, but not really, no, you cannot deduct time spent on OSS projects. Under the section "Contributions You May Not Deduct" on page A-4, 2002 1040 instructions, you cannot deduct "Value of your time or services".

So if you're looking to itemize deductions this year, give money to Xiph et al.

Disclaimer: IANALTP (I am not a licensed tax preparer)

Re:What's the difference between Speex and OGG?

[jonathan_ingram]

An example from the media formats world:

AVI is a container format (it standard for Audio Video Interleave, or something similar). Within reason, you can put data encoded with many different audio or video codecs into an AVI file -- the most common choice these days being an MPEG-4 variant (i.e. DivX) for the video, and MP3 for the audio.

A similar situation holds for Apple's container format, which often has the suffix .MOV (this is also the basis for the MPEG-4 container format). Most commonly, you'll see .MOVs with the Sorenson video codec -- and it's the closed nature of this video codec which has (until very recently) held back most .MOVs from being played back in Linux.

Back to Xiph's products: Ogg is the overall container format. It's quite simple, and is currently being submitted to the IETF as an internet recommendation. Inside this container, you can place whatever you like. Until very recently, almost every Ogg file would contain Vorbis audio, which leads to the confusion a lot of people have between the things Ogg and Vorbis stand for. This is slowly changing. Quite a few people in the movie ripping world are using Ogg as an alternative to AVI, as the Ogg container format is a lot happier with containing variable bitrate codecs (such as Vorbis) than AVI is (even variable bitrate MP3 can only be inserted into an AVI container by a fairly dodgy procedure).

Xiph's codecs include Vorbis, which is for medium bitrate music, Speex, which is for low bitrate speech, FLAC, which is for high bitrate lossless audio, and in development is Theora, a video codec which is a reworking of the previously closed VP3 codec by On2.

A few examples..

[Kjella]

AVI: Ever needed the right codec, even if the file is still called .avi? Heard of FOURCC? *Most* codecs come with Windows Media Player, but certainly not all.

TIFF: Do you know TIFF? Well there's uncompressed TIFF and compressed TIFF (I think 4-5 different compression algorigthms) that are all called .tif

DOC: Yep it's a container format. A .doc file from Office95 is not the same as a .doc file from Office XP. The actual spec keeps changing, just ask the OpenOffice people trying to reverse-engineer it. However, it's not quite in the same class as the other two - this is just one format that is changing (versioning), while files like .avi and .ogg are designed to hold different types of audio streams, for different purposes.

Kjella

SpeakFreely 7.6 does NAT!

[nadaou]

The new version of SpeakFreely for UNIX, mentioned here already several times, will handle NAT. From the v7.6 announcement:

The NAT Patch by Tor-Åke Fransson has been integrated into this release and enabled by default; this patch permits users behind routers and firewalls which perform Network Address Translation boxes to contact users who aren't.

Don't forget to try the Tcl/Tk v0.8.1 interface!

The windows version looks like it has been orphaned, so you'll have to patch it yourself if you want NAT on that. And add Speex 1.0 support while you're at it, eh?

Re:What sort of speed processor do we need?

[jmv]

Will my 300MHz Linux box be able to compress my voice in real-ish time?

Easily. The minimum requirement for real-time encoding with Speex is around a Pentium 100, so you'll have no problem.

Re:hmmm

[jmv]

(Speaking as Speex author) Well, you didn't get it because it's outdated and hasn't been replaced yet (e.g. Speex is now BSD). On the patent front, we're now much more confident about our "patent-free" statement. Of course, you can never be 100% sure with patents, no matter what you do.

Re:Is this really a charity?

[trelanexiph]

first off it's Xiph, not Xing. And secondly, you aren't getting the product because you donated, people that do not choose to donate recieve the product in the same manner and timeframe as those that donate (in fact those that take time to donate before downloading may get their product in a longer time frame (in length by the time it takes to make the donation which Xiph does greatly appreciate.) So legally no you do not get ogg, vorbis, theora or speex out of your donation. This makes the FULL amount tax deductable on your 1040.
This question is part of what makes the 501(c)3 process take so long. One of the main questions is "does the donator get anything from the donatee out of the donation". Since the GPL/BSDL are in place the answer is no, just as with the Apache Foundation.
This is not to say that these charities can continue producing software without the money. Xiph.Org PAYS several of it's coders to code fulltime, their lifestyle and continued productivity do rely on your donations, and other projects which put money in the Xiph coffers. (currently a red shoebox in emmett's closet with the xiph fish on it)

Re:What sort of speed processor do we need?

[jmv]

Speex is asymetric like most other codecs. To give you an idea, at 8 kHz Speex requires 10-20 mflops to encode in real-time, while decoding requires 1 mflops.

Re:What's the difference between Speex and OGG?

[arose]

Whatever happened to (ogg) tarkin?
It's all experimental, expect it about 2010.