Opus is a lossy compression digital audio codec; very versatile, open and royalty free
Xiph.Org, the Opus video and audio codec developer, recently announced the release of the new version of the Opus 1.4.0 audio codec.
Opus is an audio codec that is characterized by providing high-quality encoding and minimal latency for both high-bitrate audio transmission and voice compression in bandwidth-limited VoIP applications.
the codec was created by combining the best technologies from the CELT codec developed by Xiph.org and the SILK codec opened by Skype. In addition to Skype and Xiph.Org, companies like Mozilla, Octasic, Broadcom, and Google were also involved in the development of Opus.
The patents involved in Opus are granted by the companies involved in the development for unlimited use without payment of royalties. All Opus-related intellectual property rights and patent licenses are automatically delegated to applications and products that use Opus, without the need for additional approval.
There are no restrictions on the scope and creation of alternative third-party implementations. However, all rights granted are revoked in the event of patent proceedings involving Opus technologies against any Opus user.
Opus features high encoding quality and minimal latency for both high-bitrate audio streaming compression and voice compression for bandwidth-constrained VoIP telephony applications.
Main novelties of Opus 1.4
In this new version of Opus 1.4.0 that is presented, it is highlighted that the optimization of encoding parameters, with the aim of improving subjective indicators of sound quality when FEC (Forward Error Correction) is enabled to restore damaged or lost packets at bit rates from 16 to 24 kbs (LBRR, Low-Bit-Rate Redundancy) .
Another of the changes that stands out in this new version is thate added a new value of 2 to the OPUS_SET_INBAND_FEC option to enable FEC error correction, but without forcing enable SILK mode (FEC will not be used in CELT mode).
In addition to this, the improved implementation of the DTX (Discontinuous Transmission) mode, which provides suspension of the transmission of traffic in the absence of sound, has been improved.
On the other hand, it is noted that added support for the Meson build system and support for building using CMake has been improved.
It is worth mentioning that for future versions, based on machine learning technologies, Are developing experimental functions To restore audio fragments lost due to packet loss: “Real-Time Packet Loss Concealment” and “Deep Audio Redundancy”
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you should know that the reference implementations of the encoder and decoder are distributed under the BSD license. The full specifications of the Opus format are publicly available, free of charge, and approved as an Internet standard (RFC 6716). You can check the details of this launch in the following link
How to install Opus on Linux?
For those who are interested in being able to install this audio codec on their systemYou should know that most Linux distributions have the codec in their repositories and you can install it from there. Some of the Opus-compatible products out of the box include the Firefox browser, the GStreamer framework, and the FFmpeg package.
Although at the moment (at the time of writing) the new version is not yet available in some distributions and in order to obtain it they can do so by compiling the codec.
For this just open a terminal and run one of the following commands, according to your distribution. The first thing we are going to do is install some tools to be able to carry out the compilation:
In the case of those who are users of Ubuntu, Debian or any derivative:
sudo apt-get install git autoconf automake libtool gcc make
Fedora/Redhat or any derivative of these:
sudo dnf install git autoconf automake libtool gcc make
Now let's get the source code con the following command:
git clone https://gitlab.xiph.org/xiph/opus.git
cd opus
And we proceed to compile with:
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install