Skype’s New “SILK” Super-Wideband Codec

Michael Standford at WiRevolution has a nice interview with Skype’s Jonathan Christensen. In it they talk about Skype’s new “SILK” super-wideband codec. They compare it in very general terms against the companies existing SVOPC codec.

Apparently SILK offers not only excellent audio quality, but is also better suited to embedded applications. More dependent upon fixed point calculations it’s better suited to Skype clients running on hardware other than PCs. That makes perfect sense since Skype is showing up on lots of hardware these, especially now that there’s the Skype Lite Java client for many cell phones.

The codec is presently only available in Skype 4 Beta for Windows.