Opus Audio: Pairing Skype's SILC With CELT

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Opus Audio: Pairing Skype's SILC With CELT

For those that haven't heard, the IETF Codec Working Group has paired the technology from Skype's SILC codec with the CELT codec from Xiph.Org to form the Opus Interactive Audio Codec. This new codec can be used for VoIP, live music streaming, and more...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTExMDI

[abral]

Firefox already has support for the Opus codec: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674225

[allquixotic]

My understanding is that Opus can produce better quality at lower bitrates than Vorbis for certain categories of audio, such as music, and even more for voice.

Since the MicroSD cards available for phones are pretty small, it'll be neat to get an Android player that can do Opus and re-encode my entire music collection in Opus -- at about 64kbps, which would sound terrible for Vorbis, but might be as tolerable as 128k MP3 in Opus.

[Aleve Sicofante]

Any VoIP app currently supporting Opus?
Any music player currently supporting Opus?
Any encoding app currently supporting Opus?

Where to find which apps do use the codec?

I just don't understand these projects that seem to be "floating in mid air", with no real world support. There should be a list at their website announcing the projects using their codec. I'm not saying "nobody's using this", I'm just amazed that the developers don't find it important to inform who's using their great work for real life usage.

[TechMage89]

It's still in development, so I imagine it's not currently considered production-quality. However, Mumble is pretty quick to adopt new codecs to improve quality and reduce latency (they were one of the first projects to use CELT), so I imagine they will add it as an option pretty soon (PLC is a huge feature in and of itself).

[uid313]

How does this compare with Skype's SILK codec and Xiph.Org's CELT codec?

Is this the best of both, or is it some crippled variant of SILK?

[Wilfred]

My understanding is that Opus can produce better quality at lower bitrates than Vorbis for certain categories of audio, such as music, and even more for voice.

Since the MicroSD cards available for phones are pretty small, it'll be neat to get an Android player that can do Opus and re-encode my entire music collection in Opus -- at about 64kbps, which would sound terrible for Vorbis, but might be as tolerable as 128k MP3 in Opus.

As I understand it, the design goal was not so much higher quality, but mainly low delay. People really hate it when they say something and the computer has to take a long time to code their speech. I personally would never reencode my music collection to opus, and just leave the high bitrate vorbis.

[uid313]

I personally would never reencode my music collection to opus, and just leave the high bitrate vorbis.

I agree.
SD/MMC cards are getting bigger and bigger.
No phone supports Opus yet, and when they do, memory cards have gotten bigger and cheaper.

P.S. Transcoding is a sin, and those who commit it will burn!

[Spacefish]

Actually they already combined this years ago!

I think Opus is nice for VoIP with hardware connected to the outlet, on mobile devices i there is no hardware support (hardware support for opus would be complicated to create), so i draws more power form the battery than other codecs that don´t need that much CPU power. (Opus needs a lot of computing power). As our networks bandwidth grows, i think there will be more focus on battery usage than bandwidth. And sending / receiving more data over 3g costs less power than using 100% of your arm CPU.

[oibaf]

2011 multiformat listening test is here:
http://people.xiph.org/~greg/opus/ha2011/