The H.264 codec patent by Qualcomm has been ruled invalid by a San Diego Federal jury: http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197001066 . That means that H.264 codecs can now be written, distributed and revised freely under any license their authors choose, including GPL, public domain, or any other, and $free now that royalties are no longer required. How does H.264 compare with GSM and G.729 in CPU demand (MIPS:Kbps) and audio quality at low bitrates? GSM is $free, but G.729 is higher quality (tho patented with at least $10 per running codec instance royalties). Will H.264 become the favorite high-quality Asterisk codec, or will it perhaps force G.729 to become free, or negligibly cheaper? -- (C) Matthew Rubenstein
On Sat, Jan 27, 2007 at 10:20:40AM -0500, Matthew Rubenstein wrote:> How does H.264 compare with GSM and G.729 in CPU demand (MIPS:Kbps) and > audio quality at low bitrates? GSM is $free, but G.729 is higher quality > (tho patented with at least $10 per running codec instance royalties). > Will H.264 become the favorite high-quality Asterisk codec, or will it > perhaps force G.729 to become free, or negligibly cheaper?G.729 is $10 from Digium. If you want to go license several thousand codecs (or probably more like 10's of thousands) I think the Sipro license is more like a couple of bucks. Unfortunately you have to license a large number in one go, so the initial set-up is very high. Digium have done a deal (I presume) whereby they've taken the intial hit and are just sub-licensing at a cost which make it whorth while for them. Steve -- NetTek Ltd UK mob +44-(0)7775 755503 UK +44-(0)20 79932612 / US +1-(310)8577715 / Fax +44-(0)20 7483 2455 Skype/GoogleTalk/AIM/Gizmo/Mac stevekennedyuk / MSN steve@gbnet.net Euro Tech News Blog http://eurotechnews.blogspot.com
Matthew Rubenstein wrote:> The H.264 codec patent by Qualcomm has been ruled invalid by a San > Diego Federal jury: > http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197001066 . > That means that H.264 codecs can now be written, distributed and revised > freely under any license their authors choose, including GPL, public > domain, or any other, and $free now that royalties are no longer > required. > > How does H.264 compare with GSM and G.729 in CPU demand (MIPS:Kbps) and > audio quality at low bitrates? GSM is $free, but G.729 is higher quality > (tho patented with at least $10 per running codec instance royalties). > Will H.264 become the favorite high-quality Asterisk codec, or will it > perhaps force G.729 to become free, or negligibly cheaper?Although I wouldn't complain about a free G.729 codec, I have to be honest in saying that $10.00 isn't that great of an expense considering the better call quality you get. -- Warm Regards, Lee
On Sat, Jan 27, 2007 at 10:20:40AM -0500, Matthew Rubenstein wrote:> The H.264 codec patent by Qualcomm has been ruled invalid by a San > Diego Federal jury: > http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197001066 . > That means that H.264 codecs can now be written, distributed and revised > freely under any license their authors choose, including GPL, public > domain, or any other, and $free now that royalties are no longer > required. > > How does H.264 compare with GSM and G.729 in CPU demand (MIPS:Kbps) and > audio quality at low bitrates? GSM is $free, but G.729 is higher quality > (tho patented with at least $10 per running codec instance royalties). > Will H.264 become the favorite high-quality Asterisk codec, or will it > perhaps force G.729 to become free, or negligibly cheaper?H264 is video, not audio, right? Are those all the patents relevant to H264 or are there any others that Broadcom has aready licensed? Anyway, GSM is nice. SPEEX is nicer and has no patent issues. It also works in other sample rates, which will eventually become handy. -- Tzafrir Cohen icq#16849755 jabber:tzafrir@jabber.org +972-50-7952406 mailto:tzafrir.cohen@xorcom.com http://www.xorcom.com iax:guest@local.xorcom.com/tzafrir
H.264 is a video encoding standard, not an audio encoding standard. It won't help with phone calls too much, unless you're running video phones that support it. Matthew Fredrickson On Jan 27, 2007, at 9:20 AM, Matthew Rubenstein wrote:> The H.264 codec patent by Qualcomm has been ruled invalid by a San > Diego Federal jury: > http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197001066 > . > That means that H.264 codecs can now be written, distributed and > revised > freely under any license their authors choose, including GPL, public > domain, or any other, and $free now that royalties are no longer > required. > > How does H.264 compare with GSM and G.729 in CPU demand (MIPS:Kbps) > and > audio quality at low bitrates? GSM is $free, but G.729 is higher > quality > (tho patented with at least $10 per running codec instance royalties). > Will H.264 become the favorite high-quality Asterisk codec, or will it > perhaps force G.729 to become free, or negligibly cheaper? > -- > > (C) Matthew Rubenstein > > _______________________________________________ > --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- > > asterisk-users mailing list > To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Andy Davidson
2007-Feb-05 09:36 UTC
[asterisk-users] Question on G.729 (was: H.264 *Not Patented*)
On 1 Feb 2007, at 14:14, Lacy Moore - Aspendora wrote: > On 2/1/07, Andy Davidson <andy@nosignal.org> wrote: > > What I would expect to happen, is that Asterisk would transcode > > between the ulaw/alaw party, and me, wanting to listen via g729. Is > > this what *should* happen ? Worth noting that my provider does not > > support G.729. Is what is happening a bug ? Any patches I can try > > to see if they work ? Or is it my config which is broken ? > How many g729 licenses do you have? Just one - my interpretation was that one license bought one inbound, and one outbound transcoder, so my scenario would work with this (phone and * talk g.729, then * turns g.729 into ulaw for my upstream..) Do I need to buy more licenses ? -a