On 2016-12-28 05:29, Jerome Shawstad wrote:
> I've no idea whether this will be welcomed as a good idea (as it could 
> drag in other developers and advance it's acceptance/use), rejected as 
> a bad idea, or even resented as a trespassing idea.  :)  But has 
> anyone ever considered offering or trying to integrate the workings of 
> Codec2 into a better known or/and more popular codec for use in 
> specific modes?

Ideas like this pop up on this list every now and then, most recently 
earlier this year. But that was about coming up with a container if I 
remember correctly, not smushing together two codecs

> For instance right now Opus is pretty much the king of all lossy 
> codecs to my knowledge.  It beats everyone at every bitrate across the 
> board without exception at least down to 8kbps or so and can be used 
> in various specialized uses such as realtime communication with low 
> latency, not only latency-irrelevant uses such as streaming media.  
> Although Codec2 is based on totally different principles, in my not so 
> humble opinion it is the king of low bitrate voice only codecs that 
> i've heard.  The whole reason I joined the mailing list was due to 
> interest in the codec over that fact, having compared it to every 
> other super low bitrate codec i'd listened to including the standards 
> like MELPe.
> It would not be unprecedented to have totally different compression 
> algorythms under 'special modes' for lower bitrate, I believe Windows 
> WMA9 did that having separate modes for lossless, lossy music, and 
> lossy voice.  I do not know the rate of finalization of Opus but I do 
> know that if any kind of merging or enhancements would ever join the 
> project, it would make sense to have it happen earlier instead of 
> later when it's too late to be a part of the state of the art.

I'm not sure if you know, but Opus is already the combination of two 
codes. Skype's SILK for the voice part (frequencies below 8 kHz) and 
CELT for the "music" part (frequencies above 8 kHz). Opus is also quite 
finalized as I understand it. I stopped following its development some 
time ago, so I may be wrong

> Alternately it could join some other audio codec if there is anything 
> on the horizon that looks to out-everything Opus, but I have not heard 
> of it.  Unlike in the world of video where it's gone from h264 to h265 
> and VP9 to VP10, i'm not aware of any other "nextgen" audio codecs 
> that threaten to even match let alone dethrone Opus, though i'm all 
> ears if anyone is aware of them.  Since Codec2 seems the best of the 
> best voice codecs even early in it's state to me it seems like a match 
> made in heaven - and i'll freely admit wanting to have the ability to 
> conveniently play Codec2 files on everything from computers to mobile 
> phones in the future, and maybe even dedicated hardware later.
> I am aware Codec2's primary purpose is for realtime low bandwidth 
> communication - yet I see nothing against using it as a storage method 
> for space constrained primarily vocal media either, and i'd think the 
> development assistance could help advance things faster and propagate 
> use of it more widely, though now i'm getting redundant so i'll leave 
> it at that.

It'd certainly be useful for audiobooks and archives of political 
speech, and podcasts

> What say everyone, is this an idea so bad it should never be voiced 
> again, or something worthy of consideration?

I'd say it's a good goal to have, but there's plenty of important 
details going into something like this. For example, seeking. You want 
to use container which is sane and has a compact representation of seek 
tables. This rules out AVI, Ogg and maybe MOV. Matroska is probably 
fine. Being able to handle switching modes/bitrates is a plus

There's also opportunities for even better compression, since the 
bitstream is still pretty redundant. On-air this isn't something you can 
do much about since you want to keep latencies down. For storage I 
believe just throwing gz or xz at codec2 data was enough to shrink it 
considerably

/Tomas

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