What’s CODEC 2? In this video from the 2011 Digital Communications Conference held last September in Baltimore, MD, David Rowe, Australian Amateur Radio operator VK5DGR, detailed his work on an open-source, low bit-rate CODEC for Digital Voice for Amateur Radio. It’s presently in the Alpha testing stage.
More information on this codec as well as a link to the source code can be found at the CODEC2 website.
This is extremely cool stuff.
I believe there has been some progress since the presentation was recorded, and the codec has indeed hit the 2400 bit/sec mark – and there are even samples of the codec running at 1200 bit/sec on its site. At half the data rate, speech sounds pretty robotic; no surprise perhaps, but it is very impressive that it is intelligible at all.
Interesting.
For everyone who is interested in audio codecs:
http://opus-codec.org/
Opus is an free (no royalties) and open standard in development for audio.
It’s made by Xiph.org which is a non profit who tries to make free multimedia formats happen:
From: http://xiph.org/about/