K6BP | 2010-06-10 | |
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RE: Open Source DSTAR Voice -- Codec2: | ||
Sorry you feel that way, John. Actually I have an OK reputation regarding project engineering. You use my code in DD-WRT and a lot of consumer equipment, and I have two wireless chip manufacturers and a supercomputing company paying for advice between today and Monday. If I were engineering an entire product line and convinced the management that I could eliminate a $5 chip with some software engineering, it would probably be an easy sell. We don't really know what ICOM is paying for AMBE+, but it's probably that much or more. But the real question is what we do for the future of digial voice. D*STAR is already getting old. First, we need to separate the radio data transport from the voice codec, they are logically separate projects and there is room for a number of data transports, not all of them narrow-band. Regarding voice codecs, there have been a great many free ones, one from Skype, one from Broadcom, the stuff from the Vorbis project, the list goes on. The one Rowe is working on is more specialized for low-band voice radio and is a pretty achievable project, going by what he's done so far. But whatever we use for a voice codec, it has to be achievable in Open Source as well as proprietary software, because Open Source is a great paradigm for hams themselves to do leading-edge software development that we could never get done with the cooperation of our vendors, and the vendors of finished equipment want to sell it commercially and for non-ham applications without too much expense. Rowe's project fits that bill. Nobody wants to pay $200 for a box with a little old TI DSP CPU and an old compression algorithm in it. Getting rid of that thing will be a pretty easy sell. And eventually the folks who manufacture radios want a reason for you to buy a new one. One that has two codecs in it will probably sell pretty well. |
Codec; K Lite Codec Software Free Download; Ambe Codec Software Free Download. The proprietary AMBE codec. Go to cygwin.com and install it.