Opus - Totally open audio codec

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stevenz

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#109148 13-Sep-2012 12:41

Now this sounds intriguing. An audio codec that is suitable for virtually all purposes and is royalty free.

http://opus-codec.org/

Support is already in the current build of Firefox, amongst other apps. Sounds promising.

Bit-rates from 6 kb/s to 510 kb/s
Sampling rates from 8 kHz (narrowband) to 48 kHz (fullband)
Frame sizes from 2.5 ms to 60 ms
Support for both constant bit-rate (CBR) and variable bit-rate (VBR)
Audio bandwidth from narrowband to full-band
Support for speech and music
Support for mono and stereo
Support for up to 255 channels (multistream frames)
Dynamically adjustable bitrate, audio bandwidth, and frame size
Good loss robustness and packet loss concealment (PLC)
Floating point and fixed-point implementation

In a similar vein to OGG but seems a bit more versatile, maybe it'll catch on more.

@KnightNZ

billgates

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#685520 13-Sep-2012 12:44

Skype has written a easy to explain blog about it yesterday as well.

http://blogs.skype.com/en/2012/09/skype_and_a_new_audio_codec.html

Do whatever you want to do man.

sidefx

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#685524 13-Sep-2012 12:53

Now that does sound promising.

stevenz:
In a similar vein to OGG but seems a bit more versatile, maybe it'll catch on more.

Minor point; wasn't ogg the container format and vorbis the codec? :)

"I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there." | Octopus Energy | Sharesies
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stevenz

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#685525 13-Sep-2012 12:55

Pedant ;)

@KnightNZ

sidefx

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#685537 13-Sep-2012 13:03

Guilty, sorry :)

The firefox writeups are pretty good too:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/09/its-opus-it-rocks-and-now-its-an-audio-codec-standard

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/firefox-beta-15-supports-the-new-opus-audio-format/

"I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there." | Octopus Energy | Sharesies
- Richard Feynman

stevenz

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#685581 13-Sep-2012 13:43

Speed is good too, tested encoding a 13.5 minute track and got:

22.3s to encode using LAME (v3.99, 64bit build)
17s to encode using Opus!

Using entirely default settings of course, so YMMV.

The resulting file played happily in Firefox.

@KnightNZ

blair003

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#685585 13-Sep-2012 13:53

I thought the main difference between Opus and Vorbis is that Opus was originally aimed at the low latency applications such as real time communication, voip etc where there is no real dominant codec.

Whereas vorbis was really going head to head with the likes of mp3, which is well entrenched.

As a side benefit, it turns out that Opus compares pretty well to mp3 and aac as well.. but I got the impression that Opus could for example be a replacement for the likes of G.722?

And a couple of companies have made patent claims, namely Qualcom and Huawei, but the Opus developers are adamant that the patents don't apply to their code (but that didn't really work out for samsung). And while the patent claims may be subject to FRAND, that could still mean there is a cost involved which would really suck.

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stevenz

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#685599 13-Sep-2012 14:13

Hopefully they are using a genuine from-scratch algorithm. Now someone needs a comparable video codec so we can get rid of h.264.

@KnightNZ

dontpanic42

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#685642 13-Sep-2012 15:31

stevenz: Hopefully they are using a genuine from-scratch algorithm. Now someone needs a comparable video codec so we can get rid of h.264.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(video_compression_format)

I don't know the technical ins and outs of this video codec. I simply know that it exists, and that is it purportedly an open and royalty-free video compression format.

These two codecs inside an MKV or OGG container could potentially become the new open source standard.

1080p

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#685675 13-Sep-2012 16:17

1080p

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#685679 13-Sep-2012 16:19

x264 is already a completely open source implementation of h.264. h.265 development will begin soon, perhaps focus should shift to that :)

blair003

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#685715 13-Sep-2012 17:04

hahha.. that's the good thing about standards right -- there are so many to choose from.