asterisk users - Jan 2009 - G.729.1 - any interest?

The G.729.1 "wideband" codec is starting to show a slight bit of  
traction.  There is a possibility that Asterisk could support G.729.1  
- would you use it or buy it if it was available?  More importantly,  
does any equipment with which your systems currently exchange traffic  
support G.729.1?  Currently, the number of devices supporting G.729.1  
seems to be fairly limited and it may be an imbalanced decision to  
support a codec that nobody else uses.

If G.729.1 were to be offered as a codec for Asterisk by Digium, it  
would have to be as a commercial product, as the codec is patent- 
encumbered.  Pricing and licensing terms are outside the scope of this  
discussion, but I would expect something like G.729.  Of course,  
passthrough-mode (non-transcoding) would not require licensing with  
Asterisk and is outside of the scope of this question.  Timing is also  
an unknown issue - there are obviously many other projects in the  
pipeline for the Digium engineering team to work on before this  
probably could be completed, even if the decision is made to pursue a  
development effort.


Note that G.722 is free and already available, and may have similar  
MOS scores (but certainly not exactly similar) as that of G.729.1.   
Comparisons of G.729.1 and G.722 are left as exercises to the reader,  
or see the excellent presentation below which is quite enlightening.

Your opinions are welcome on the topic!

Resources:
http://portal.etsi.org/stq/workshop2007presentations/quinquis_slides.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.729.1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.722

[Apologies for the cross-post - this has some interest to both the  
user and development community, I think.  I'll also apologize for what  
is a post about issues that are not "open-source", but it seems that  
within Digium I'm probably the most appropriate person to canvass the  
community on this particular question, as it involves gauging the  
general thinking of the VoIP community and is not merely a Digium-only  
concern.]

JT


---
John Todd                       email:jtodd at digium.com
Digium, Inc. | Asterisk Open Source Community Director
445 Jan Davis Drive NW -  Huntsville AL 35806  -   USA
direct: +1-256-428-6083         http://www.digium.com/

John Todd wrote:
> The G.729.1 "wideband" codec is starting to show a slight bit of
> traction.  There is a possibility that Asterisk could support G.729.1  
> - would you use it or buy it if it was available?  More importantly,  
> does any equipment with which your systems currently exchange traffic  
> support G.729.1?  Currently, the number of devices supporting G.729.1  
> seems to be fairly limited and it may be an imbalanced decision to  
> support a codec that nobody else uses.
>
> If G.729.1 were to be offered as a codec for Asterisk by Digium, it  
> would have to be as a commercial product, as the codec is patent- 
> encumbered.  Pricing and licensing terms are outside the scope of this  
> discussion, but I would expect something like G.729.  Of course,  
> passthrough-mode (non-transcoding) would not require licensing with  
> Asterisk and is outside of the scope of this question.  Timing is also  
> an unknown issue - there are obviously many other projects in the  
> pipeline for the Digium engineering team to work on before this  
> probably could be completed, even if the decision is made to pursue a  
> development effort.
>
>
> Note that G.722 is free and already available, and may have similar  
> MOS scores (but certainly not exactly similar) as that of G.729.1.   
> Comparisons of G.729.1 and G.722 are left as exercises to the reader,  
> or see the excellent presentation below which is quite enlightening.
>
> Your opinions are welcome on the topic!
>
> Resources:
> http://portal.etsi.org/stq/workshop2007presentations/quinquis_slides.pdf
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.729.1
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.722
>
> [Apologies for the cross-post - this has some interest to both the  
> user and development community, I think.  I'll also apologize for what
> is a post about issues that are not "open-source", but it seems
that
> within Digium I'm probably the most appropriate person to canvass the  
> community on this particular question, as it involves gauging the  
> general thinking of the VoIP community and is not merely a Digium-only  
> concern.]
>   
Where have you seen it getting traction? France Telecom came up with it, 
and are using it, but that's kind of isolated from the rest of the 
universe. The PDF you referenced is little more than a France Telecoms 
sales pitch for G.729.1. Audiocodes announced something, but its vague 
and they aren't shipping yet. AMR-WB would make more sense, as 3G 
cellphones all use it, and transcoding these things looses huge amounts 
of quality. G.722.1 is also getting somewhere, largely because of 
Polycom's commitment to it.

The really wacky one is G.711.1. Has anyone heard of people taking that 
seriously.

Regards,
Steve

St?phane Van Geystelen wrote:
> You know my opinion about it ;)
> The G729.1 is still a 50Hz 7000kHz bandwidth. An ultra wideband codec
> capabilities would be a real breakthrough.
7KHz is not ultra-wideband, it's wideband. There are already wideband
codecs out there, including G.722, G.722.1 and AMR-WB, to name a few.
There are also ultra-wideband codecs (16KHz bandwidth) including G.722.1C.

-- 
Kevin P. Fleming
Digium, Inc. | Director of Software Technologies
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
skype: kpfleming | jabber: kpfleming at digium.com
Check us out at www.digium.com & www.asterisk.org

Dmitry Andrianov wrote:
> Did I miss something? Is Asterisk capable of handling 16KHz audio already?
Can it mix 16KHz streams in the meetme rooms? Can it downsample them to 8kHz for
Zap channels?
Asterisk 1.6 can handle 16KHz streams and resample between 8KHz and
16KHz. The current conferencing implementation is 8KHz only, but the new
one that Josh Colp has been working on will be able to support 16KHz
(and higher, presumably) conference mixing. It is scheduled to be in
Asterisk 1.6.2, although it will be a parallel implementation, and won't
affect app_meetme.
> Who needs 16khz codec if the rest of the system cannot do anything about
it?
Very true :-)

-- 
Kevin P. Fleming
Digium, Inc. | Director of Software Technologies
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
skype: kpfleming | jabber: kpfleming at digium.com
Check us out at www.digium.com & www.asterisk.org