Opus — the Codec To End All Codecs 327
New submitter jmv writes "It's official. The Opus audio codec is now standardized by the IETF as RFC 6716. Opus is the first state-of-the-art, fully Free and Open audio codec ratified by a major standards organization. Better, Opus covers basically the entire audio-coding application space and manages to be as good or better than existing proprietary codecs over this whole space. Opus is the result of a collaboration between Xiph.Org, Mozilla, Microsoft (yes!), Broadcom, Octasic, and Google. See the Mozilla announcement and the Xiph.Org press release for more details."
Re:No Loseless support? (Score:2, Interesting)
FLAC mainly, same reason that is it not replacing codec2 either.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaAD71h9gDU
It's awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
About 9 months ago, I implemented Opus in our VoIP products, replacing G722 and Speex. It kicks a whole lot of ass. Compared to speex, It's far better coded, uses far fewer CPU cycles, and sounds vastly better (even to me, and I have shitty hearing). Similarly, we replaced all our old audio DSP pipeline, based on the Speex library (thanks Xiph.org, etc) with the low-level components from WebRTC (thanks Google!) and things have never sounded better.
Getting it right the second time! (Score:5, Interesting)
Kudos to the folks working on this. We were all rooting for ogg/vorbis/xiph, but they had some lessons to learn. Positives that I see for Opus:
still could use some love:
Still, an order of magnitude better than the last attempt at gaining industry acceptance of free codecs. This one might just work out!
Re:Sorry, nope. (Score:5, Interesting)
Bitrates below 16 kb/s are irrelevant on the Internet. Just the overhead (IP+UDP+RTP headers) of sending packets every 20 ms is 16 kb/s. At that point, you might as well transmit some real quality.
Re:No Loseless support? (Score:3, Interesting)
I noticed there were no hardware manufacturers of note on the supported list -- are you planning to get chip-based support for Opus (so that it'll be handled transparently by all the phones etc out there, including, say Apple)?
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Interesting)
What would make an audio codec something worth using that would make you switch?
I would assume that widespread support among major applications would be an issue. You could also throw in the ability to compact an audio stream better than alternatives might be useful in some applications. Simply having content in that codec would be very useful as well.
I would say being patent and license free (aka it can be incorporated into a GPL'd application) would be pretty far down the list, but not needing to pay a licensing fee might make the difference for some marginal applications or for start up groups needing some sort of audio playback where even a few extra dollars in royalties can end up costing more than it is worth (such as is the case for the current MP3 format).
Then again that is sort of what pushed the VHS format over Betamax in the video tape format wars.... small independent producers could mass produce VHS tapes cheaper than the Betamax tapes, and for marginal videos (*cough* porn movies *cough*) that made all of the difference.
The problem here is that audio codecs are pretty entrenched and as you've suggested that even free alternatives are available. Unless there is something substantially different being done by this codec that even a non-techie can notice and suggest that this new algorithm is substantially better, I really have a hard time seeing this being adopted widely. There might be some niche applications if the compression algorithm is even a few percentage points better, such as perhaps a transmission protocol for audio on the Iridium satellites. Something like that may even be useful to have an on the fly codec converter depending on how it is used.
Re:No Loseless support? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually generic data compression algorithms don't work very well on audio files. Lossless audio codecs like ALAC and FLAC do waveform analysis and "know more" about the nature of audio files so that they can be compressed more than your typical compression algorithm like gzip would do.
Re:Obligatory (Score:2, Interesting)
>>>Ogg? 5 devices.
>>>Apple's codec? 5 devices.
What is Apple's codec? You mean that AppleLossless format? They don't even sell music in that format. :-( As for MP3 I look forward to the day it gets replaced with AACplusSBR as standard. That codec sounds so much better even in tight lowbit situations.
Re:No Loseless support? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think silicon support for audio codecs is really useful anymore. Audio codecs have such a low complexity compared to video that modern smartphones can run them really easily.I haven't measured exactly, but I'd say you can probably decode an Opus stream with about 2% CPU on the latest Android phone. Not worth paying for extra silicon.
Re:Some indications that it's not "Fully Free" ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I asked Qualcom if they'd consider changing their declaration to royalty-free. I don't know anyone at Huawei.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I belive this one might be the exception. So many mayor players major playes have participated and are standing behing Opus, I can easily see this becoming the dominant codec for loosy audio. It won't displace flac, as flac is looseless, but it will displace oga, mp3, and other major players given time.
I'm pretty sure it'll become the de facto standard in web as well, given the browser support, and HTML5's new <audio> tag.
(I know that XKCD comic is meant to be a joke, but it does actually prefectly reflect what happens with almost every new standard these days)
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Interesting)
There is no dominant format at the moment. Music is ogg, mp3, flac and probably a few others. Flac is loosless, so it won't dissapear, but the other two gradualy will.
The html5 <audio> tag hasn't been used much yet, and I'm betting <audio>+Opus will be the one to domainte over current flash-only players (since it seems it'll be the best supported format).
Movies in MKV files are actually container with video streams and audio streams. There's also a small variety of formats used for those audio streams, and maybe Opus catches on. I certainly hope it does.
But the market is fragmented, there's lots of different format being used in different areas. Opus has a lot of giants behind it, if they do their part, Opus support will be better than that of many other formats in the long run, hence users will tend to adopt it, in time.
Re:Obligatory (Score:2, Interesting)
OGG works on Android devices, so a lot more than 5. You could say "everything but Apple", really.
Re:No Loseless support? (Score:3, Interesting)
If it isn't built in from the start, multi-channel will never work well.
1. Formats that hasn't been planned for it, will lack stuff like declaring WHAT the channels are. AC3 for instance can have 4-channel left-center-right-back, or 4-channel left-right-leftback-leftright. So just knowing you have 4 channels is USELESS.
2. It will lack optimizations similar to joined-stereo, so you achieve good bit-rates by not encoding the similarities between all the channels over and over again.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Interesting)
The point is to be able to use lower bitrates and get the same quality. This is especially useful for things like audio streaming over the internet, where less bandwidth used equals more space for listeners.
For audio streaming over the Internet, it's even more important to gracefully deal with packet loss and packets arriving out of order. You don't want drop-outs and audible artefacts.
This generally means that a format that uses large decoding buffers will lose out.
ABX-testing in perfect listening conditions with zero packet loss and no out-of-order packets is useless if this were the purpose.
As for high-end and local streaming, well, FLAC and other lossless formats are always going to be better than any lossy format, no matter how good they are.
And with today's bandwidth and storage capacities, where 2 TB drives, GbE and 300 Mbps WiFi are standard, there's little point in using lossy compression for audio.
So again, I fail to see the importance of this, unless it is to sneak DRM into music again.