New York — Skype, the company that popularized VoIP communications around the globe and has used their SILK audio codec since 2009 to serve over 750 billion Skype-to-Skype minutes, recently unveiled a new codec dubbed as: ‘Opus’ that will allow users to make “CD-quality” calls over the Internet.
The update, dubbed as Opus, would sound to be rather fitting, as it contains everything to do with the audio world, and not only that, it does send the meaning straight and true even to a non-geek.
Opus was conceived on the foundation of Skype’s highly-successful SILK codec systems builds on the SILK codec systems introduced in 2009 and is now ready to be rolled out after gaining approval from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), allowing other firms to embed the codec in their technology, as the VoIP provider hopes that the Opus standard will be more widely adopted in due time.
Karlheinz Wurm, the audio and video product engineering director at Skype, said in a blog post that the firm believes this will help improve VoIP services in use on the web. Wurm said the codec, “Opus,” will allow state-of-the-art performance “under any condition.”
Describing the cool aspects of this release, Wurm mentioned, “Opus will make a quiet but crystal clear entry into the world — most people will take for granted the high sound fidelity when it arrives in the Skype client, through browsers and gateways, and we hope on mobile phones, game consoles and conference rooms, too.”
In fact, the fidelity of Opus is said to improve audio experiences across the spectrum from narrowband mono to fullband stereo, regardless of whether it is voice or music that we are talking about here, pardon the pun.
Additionally, it will be higher-quality compared to a range of current codecs for both voice and music, and they are hoping that mobile data network operators will fall in love with it due to its higher level of efficiency that takes up less megabytes than normal.
More so, if you have a poor connection then you will experience less distortion. If you are on a fast connection, then the person on the other end of the call will sound like they are in the same room with you.
“Because Opus was designed for the Internet, it can adjust seamlessly on-the-fly between any of its operating modes to adjust to variations in available internet resources, whether moving from 3G to WiFi or competing with the house next door for broadband bandwidth,” Wurm said in a blog post.
Elaborating further, Wurm said that Opus has multiple mechanisms to deal with and recover from packet loss in the network, promising fewer gaps in conversation and lost moments in calls. “Future Skype users will talk in CD quality (fullband stereo) using Skype,” he said.
Going forward, he added that the firm had conceived the new update to efficiently switching between different connection methods that users of mobile devices are regularly using and eliminate lost or patchy calls.
Wurm said, Opus is multi-purpose, efficient and smart, working across an unprecedented range of bitrates, sampling rates and frame sizes. “It is efficient for speech yet still great for music,” he said.
Apparently, the move comes as Skype becomes part of Microsoft following a $12.5bn acquisition by the Redmond giant, as it looks to boost its conferencing and collaboration services to compete with the likes of Cisco in this market.