Slashdot Mirror
Codec2 — an Open Source, Low-Bandwidth Voice Codec
Bruce Perens writes "Codec2 is an Open Source digital voice codec for low-bandwidth applications, in its first Alpha release. Currently it can encode 3.75 seconds of clear speech in 1050 bytes, and there are opportunities to code in additional compression that will further reduce its bandwidth. The main developer is David Rowe, who also worked on Speex. Originally designed for Amateur Radio, both via sound-card software modems on HF radio and as an alternative to the proprietary voice codec presently used in D-STAR, the codec is probably also useful for telephony at a fraction of current bandwidths. The algorithm is based on papers from the 1980s, and is intended to be unencumbered by valid unexpired patent claims. The license is LGPL2. The project is seeking developers for testing in applications, algorithmic improvement, conversion to fixed-point, and coding to be more suitable
for embedded systems."
I'll be presenting on Codec2 at the ARRL/TAPR Digital Communications Conference this weekend in Vancouver Washington, Near Portland. I'll try to get the video online.
Bruce Perens.
The original rationale for Codec2 is at Codec2.org. I've been promoting this issue for about four years, as I was bothered by the proprietary nature of the AMBE codec in D-STAR. But I didn't have the math, etc., to do the work myself. It was really fortunate that David became motivated to do the work without charge. He has a Ph.D. in voice coding. By the way, look over his web site rowetel.com for the other work he's done: two really nice Open Hardware projects - a PBX and a mesh telephony device, an Open Source echo canceler for digital telephony, used in Asterisk and elsewhere, and his own electric car conversion. He'd be my nomination for the MacArthur grant.
Bruce Perens.
i assume it's acceptable... but it angers me that someone thought it was relevant to give the exact number of bytes for a seemingly arbitrary 3.5 seconds of audio, but failed to say how long it take to encode that 3.5 seconds of audio, or what average latency can be expected after buffer conditions are met.
Congratulations on the license, OM. We haven't yet explored how to wedge this into D-STAR, but sending it as data rather than voice would be one way. All of the D-STAR radios except the latest one, the IC-92AD, use a plug-in daughter board to hold the AMBE chip, and it might be that somebody could make a dual-chip version of this board sometime. Since AMBE is proprietary we are stuck using their chip if we want to be compatible, unless the repeater does the conversion for us using a DV-Dongle. They sell TI DSP chips with their program burned in, and don't give out the algorithm.
It may be that on D-STAR the AMBE chip also does the modulation for a data transmission, just doesn't run the codec. But the modulation is known and there is a sound-card software implementation of D-STAR that interoperates with it. I don't have any D-STAR equipment to test. The folks on dstar_development@yahoogroups.com know a lot more about D-STAR.
73
K6BP
Bruce Perens.
I think you could cut the sample rate in half and get acceptable performance, but I've not tried. Currently I think it's 25 microsecond frames, and each frame has one set of LSPs and two sets of voicing information so it's interpolated into 12.5 microsecond frames. Those lower bandwidth codecs do 50 microsecond frames. Go forth and hack upon it if you'd like to see. Also, there are some optimizations that are obvious to David and Jean-Marc (and which I barely understand) that haven't been added yet. One is that the LSPs are monotonic and nothing has been done to remove that redundancy. Delta coding or vector quantization might be ways to do that. I understand delta coding but would not be the one to do VQ. Another is that there is a lot of correlation of the LSPs between adjacent frames, so you don't necessarily have to send the entire LSP set every frame. And there is probably lots of other opportunity for compression that I have no concept of.
Bruce Perens.
Congratulations on your new license!
The proprietary AMBE codec bothers me, too. I think that a closed, license-encumbered, proprietary codec is entirely inappropriate for ham radio use.
The repeater can rebroadcast the data, but that data would be AMBE encoded, and AMBE is both trade-secret in its implementation and patented in some of its algorithms. There may be an AMBE chip in the repeater, I've not played with one. The usual way one converts to and from AMBE on a PC is with a device called the DV-Dongle, which contains the AMBE chip. This costs lots of money and is not nearly so powerful as the CPU of the computer it's plugged into, which is one reason to be fed up with proprietary codecs.
So, if you had some newer, Codec2-based radios, and some older D-STAR radios, linking repeaters might be a good way to get them to talk to each other.
This is hand-waving about a lot of issues, like we've not designed the next generation of data radio to put Codec2 into. One might guess that such a thing could use IPV6, and better modulation than just FM, and FEC, etc.
Bruce Perens.
It encoded those 3.75 seconds in 0.06 seconds and decoded in 0.04 seconds on my AMD Phenom 9750 2.4 GHz, one core only, compiled with GCC and the -O3 switch. That's all of the overhead of the program starting and exiting, too. It's using floating, not fixed point.
This, it seems, bodes well for low latency of the final implementation on a DSP chip.
Bruce Perens.
At such high compression rates, one could wonder if the optimizations to transmit clear speech make assumptions about the language used. Does it work well with French ? Arabic ? Chinese ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
We don't know yet, but I don't see how it could be worse than AMBE in D-STAR, which makes various eructions when faced with large packet loss. I did various sorts of bit-error injection inadvertently while debugging yesterday, and right now you still get comprehensible voice with significant corruption of the LSP data. This, IMO, indicates an opportunity for more compression. Handling the problems of the radio link is more a problem for forward error correction, etc.
Bruce Perens.
One of the fastest ways to ensure its testing and distribution is to use it in Mumble - the low latency voice chat software (with an iPhone client as well).
Mumble is typically used by gaming clans for their chat rooms and it Codec2 would be tested in real-life conditions.