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November 10, 2015:
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CD-quality Audio coming soon to Skype via Opus Codec

  • Posted By Andrew Zarian
  • September 14, 2012

The Video/Audio Service will be getting an upgrade soon according to product engineering director Karlheinz Wurm. Karlheinz made a post on the official Skype blog early this week discussing the future of the Voip service and how it will continue to improve audio quality with a new audio Codec called "Opus". This new Codec will allow state-of-the-art performance "under any condition."

"If you'll pardon the pun, Opus will make a quiet but crystal clear entry into the world - most people will take for granted the high sound fidelity when it arrives in the Skype client, through browsers and gateways, and we hope on mobile phones, game consoles and conference rooms, too," Karlheinz stated on the Skype blog.

Some of the features Skype hopes to improve with the new codec are:

  •     Opus will improve audio experiences across the spectrum from narrowband mono to fullband stereo for both voice and music.
  •    Opus is higher-quality than a broad collection of existing codecs for both voice and music. If you don't believe us, take a look at the test results.
  •     We believe that mobile data network operators will love it because it is more efficient, using up fewer megabytes.
  •     The innovation in Opus fuses SILK for voice with Xiph.Org's CELT codec for music.
  •     There's even a hybrid mode using both codecs at the same time.
  •     Opus is versatile, efficient and smart, working across an unprecedented range of bitrates, sampling rates and frame sizes. It is efficient for speech yet still great for music.

Opus was standardised by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) this week, and was created by Mozilla and Skype Google, Broadcom and a few other well known companies.

No word yet on when the new codec will debut but we are all very excited to see how it will improve call quality over Skype.

Source

Skype Blog

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