Summary:	ASTERISK-00146: [request] Support other Speex bitrates
Reporter:	Brian West (bkw918)	Labels:
Date Opened:	2003-08-21 17:34:08	Date Closed:	2011-06-07 14:05:23
Priority:	Major	Regression?	No
Status:	Closed/Complete	Components:	Core/General
Versions:		Frequency of Occurrence
Related Issues:
Environment:		Attachments:
Description:	http://www.speex.org/audio/samples/ coded 4 kbps coded 4 kbps VBR coded 6 kbps coded 8 kbps coded 8 kbps VBR coded 11 kbps coded 15 kbps ****** ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ****** I would like to have the option to use the lower bitrate speex codecs if possible.   speex4 speex4vbr speex6 speex6vbr speex8 speex8vbr speex11 speex15 (or just speex defaults to the 15k codec) Just and idea.
Comments:	By: John Todd (jtodd) 2003-09-02 13:40:04 I'm ashamed to say I had not actually looked at the lower-bandwidth encoding options of Speex in the past, and skipped right over that section of the text in favor of the high bandwidth bitrates.  What a mistake!  I am extremely impressed with the 4kbps VBR rate for Speex, at least from the samples on the Speex website. If the sound quality is as good as advertised at the low bitrates, the addition of selectable features for Speex would truly be an asset to Asterisk on a per-call basis (heck, even just per-peer.)  I have several clients who need to move traffic across international IP capacity, and the low-bandwidth option of choice to them is G.729 (LPC10 is not an option due to sound quality issues.)  The very interesting features of VAD and VBR look to be (on paper, at least) a real win as well, with the channel bitrate being reduced even further by silence and sound complexity compression. Exposing codec feature selections to the dialplan would be interesting, but I expect Mark will want to (correctly) implement a generic method for doing this.  However, are there any other codecs that Asterisk supports that have the ability to use different options (bitrate, VBR, VAD)?  Is it worthwhile to make this a generic function of some sort, or is it sufficient to make specific techniques just for Speex? (${SPEEX-BITRATE}, or ${SPEEX-VBR} to give crude examples.) Why am I so excited about this?  The point of VoIP for most of my customers is twofold: the first point is the addition of new and novel services that they would not be able to offer previously without investing a lot in hardware.  The second (and for some, the primary) point is that VoIP allows the transmission of voice packets over a less expensive packetized path than TDM.  Thus, the biggest number on their minds is "Cost of Bandwidth!"   The more voice streams you can pack into the bandwidth, the less they pay for bandwidth, and thus the larger the profit margin - very simple equation.  So, they're really REALLY interested in any way to get more calls into the same number of bits per second, and Speex seems to have some interesting options in that arena. Combined with the clever use of trunking with IAX2, I could possibly see (looking at back-of-napkin, totally theoretical numbers) something like 400 calls in a megabit between two Asterisk servers.  That number seems wrong to me, and I expect my first impression is correct, but here's the math: with my IAX2 tests which I documented previously on this list, I got a theoretical 103 calls into a megabit of bandwidth with G.729 at 9.6kbps per additional call.  Now, the Speex codec can be turned down to 4kbps, so I can get 2.4 Speex calls into the same space that I fit one G.729 call.  So, (2.4 * 103 = 247)  into a megabit.  Now, usually only one person is talking at a time.  This means VAD would be active on 50% of the channels, thus eliminating traffic in one way for all calls.  I'm sure that's not quite accurate due to background noise and overtalk, so let's say that only 30% of the legs are empty at any one time due to VAD.  So, that's an additional few channels, so now we're at (247 + (247 * .3) = 321) total channels.  Now I move into the really unstable math (i.e.: I'm making this up based on wild fantasy.)   If VBR is implemented, maybe/hopefully/possibly that permits us another 25% savings on bits per second, so that turns into (321 + (321 * .25) = 401) channels in a single megabit.  This seems impossible.  Anyone care to shoot holes in these numbers? By: Brian West (bkw918) 2003-09-02 13:45:19 Very well put.  I think mark was looking at a speex.conf type setup or maybe a per peer using the codec names. ie speex4 speex4vbr and so on. bkw By: James Golovich (jamesgolovich) 2003-09-02 13:52:46 using the codec names like that would quickly eat through the available name space for codecs in asterisk.  I suspect the right way to do it would be to add an additional bitrate setting By: James Golovich (jamesgolovich) 2003-09-03 11:51:32 I started playing with some of the various options to speex last night and it will be easy to implement all these once we have a generic way to configure them.  Like jtodd I'd like to be able to pick settings on a per channel/call basis or at least per peer. The 2.4, 4, and 5.8kb bitrates all sounded pretty bad but they did work.  Even a normal ring sounded bad.  The 8kb was quite impressive.  I was trying just the fixed bitrates, I'll see if the lower bitrates sound better with abr or vbr and other options enabled. So the big stumbling block now is an easy way to configure these options, in a way that is generic enough that could be applied to other codecs By: zoa (zoa) 2003-09-21 12:56:53 Afaik, g729 also allows to use lower bitrates. (I am currently using 8kbit/s for g729, overhead included, measured on the client side, thus with only one connection - openh323, openphone.) By: Brian West (bkw918) 2003-09-24 10:08:55 James how did you toy with the lower bitrates?  can you provide examples ? bkw By: Brian West (bkw918) 2003-11-22 14:00:38.000-0600 Can someone provide examples of how to set the bitrates in speex? By: Brian West (bkw918) 2004-01-26 21:41:40.000-0600 Its a nice option but not possible at this time. (well we can but its not a good idea at this time)