[Asterisk-Dev] writing a GPL G.729?

[Steve Underwood]

Steve Kann wrote:

> Race Vanderdecken wrote:
>
>> The G.729 people/corporations/researchers and such spent a bunch of time
>> figuring it out so they deserve to have the right to charge for it.
>>
>> These are the rules of the game. Don't like it? Write it yourself and
>> then give it away. But don't ask others for the shirt off their back
>> because you are left out in the cold Mr. Grasshopper.
>>  
>>
> I don't know anything about Mr. Grasshopper's temperatures, but I 
> would say that you don't need to write it yourself..
>
> Just use speex, and encourage hardphone vendors to do so as well.
>
> It is the only high-quality, patent-free codec out there. If people 
> would invest half the effort they are putting into whining about 
> G729's patents into supporting patent-free alternatives, we'd all have 
> less headaches to worry about.

I fully agree that promoting Speex is the right thing. I recently heard 
that Vorbis has gained real traction in the gaming world, because it 
avoids the licence fees associated with any other music compression. It 
seems, therefore, that positioned correctly it might be possible to see 
Speex gain some traction in voice compression too. However, right now 
the fixed point implementation of Speex still seems a bit weak, and I 
don't think any optimised versions for things like 54x, 2181, etc. 
exist. Without that, it won't get very far in VoIP.

Regards,
Steve