Speex

Speex

Filename extension	.spx
Internet media type	audio/x-speex, audio/speex, audio/ogg
Developed by	Xiph.Org Foundation, Jean-Marc Valin
Type of format	Audio
Contained by	Ogg
Standard	RFC 5574
Open format?	Yes
Website	www.speex.org

Speex is an audio compression format designed for speech and also a free software speech codec that may be used on VoIP applications and podcasts. It is based on the CELP speech coding algorithm. Speex claims to be free of any patent restrictions and is licensed under the revised (3-clause) BSD license. It may be used with the Ogg container format or directly transmitted over /. It may also be used with the FLV container format.

The Speex designers see their project as complementary to the Vorbis general-purpose audio compression project.

Speex is a lossy format, meaning quality is permanently degraded to reduce file size.

The Speex project was created on February 13, 2002. The first development versions of Speex were released under LGPL license, but as of version 1.0 beta 1, Speex is released under Xiph's version of the (revised) BSD license. Speex 1.0 was announced on March 24, 2003, after a year of development. The last stable version of Speex encoder and decoder is 1.1.12.

Xiph.Org now considers Speex obsolete; its successor is the more modern Opus codec, which surpasses its performance in all areas.

Speex is targeted at voice over IP (VoIP) and file-based compression. The design goals have been to make a codec that would be optimized for high quality speech and low bit rate. To achieve this the codec uses multiple bit rates, and supports ultra-wideband (32 kHz sampling rate), wideband (16 kHz sampling rate) and narrowband (telephone quality, 8 kHz sampling rate). Since Speex was designed for VoIP instead of cell phone use, the codec must be robust to lost packets, but not to corrupted ones. All this led to the choice of code excited linear prediction (CELP) as the encoding technique to use for Speex. One of the main reasons is that CELP has long proven that it could do the job and scale well to both low bit rates (as evidenced by DoD CELP @ 4.8 kbit/s) and high bit rates (as with G.728 @ 16 kbit/s). The main characteristics can be summarized as follows: