I recently received a promotional email from Amazon offering the Linksys Tmobile @ Home HiPort for just $15.99. This was the internet router device that has a UMA interface on-board. Add a T-Mobile SIM card and you have cellular trunk…
One of the first interesting things to arise out of this weeks WebRTC conference in Atlanta is an announcement from Audio Codes that they will be adding support for the Opus codec to their 400HD series of SIP desk phones. Here’s the press release.
There seems to be a little confusion about what’s actually going to be offered. The title of the release states, “AudioCodes Announces WebRTC Phone.” The copy goes on to describe that the hardware will be extended to provide native support the Opus codec. This capability is projected to be deliverable in Q4-2013.
Think back to the handful of new audio codecs that have been released over the past few years; CELT, SILK and Opus to name a few. Then there are the handful of proprietary codecs that have become available under more attractive licenses. Polycom’s Siren family come to mind on that front. In all of these cases I have observed that the Freeswitch development team are typically amongst the very first to implement any new codec.
In recent weeks they have added support for G.719, an ITU standard codec created by Polycom and Ericsson. With a sample rate of 48 KHz, G.719 is a full-bandwidth codec, supporting a useful audio channel of 20 Hz- 20 KHz. It does so with end-to-end delay of only 40 ms and at bit rates from 32 kbps to 128 kbps. It also supports stereo audio.
Upon completion of the ITU standards process Polycom published a white paper on the codec; G.719: The First ITU-T Standard for Full-Band Audio (pdf).
After my little experimental effort with Opus in the freeware PhonerLite soft phone I reached out to a variety of people seeking advice about other software supporting this new codec. Someone suggested that I try Countherpath’s Bria. Counterpath is the…
A couple of weeks ago I was trying the RealPresence Mobile app from Polycom. I was trying it on my iPad since none of my various Android devices were officially supported.
JMR left a comment on the post saying that he had just installed the Android release on his Nexus 7. Since the Nexus 7 is my preferred tablet I decided that I’d give it a try on that device as well.
Happily, the app seems to work pretty well on the Nexus 7. I registered it with my OnSIP account from which point it could call my Polycom VVX phones. Next I used it to call a Polycom RMX 2000 video conference bridge. That also worked nicely.
Inspired by my earlier interaction with Mike Phillips I thought it would be interesting to get some hands on experience with Opus. It would be worthwhile staging a little test to better understand the audio path presented in one or more Opus implementations.
A quick Google search revealed that PhonerLite, the freeware Windows soft phone from Germany, includes Opus from the v1.92 release onward. According to the release notes support for Opus replaced support for CELT. The current release is v2.08 from April 16, 2013.
I had first encountered PhonerLite some time ago, when I was seeking a G.722 capable soft phone. It’s very functional but a bit quirky.