Remorseless German boffins are patting themselves on the back after winning a prize for their efforts developing "MP3 for phone calls". The prize in question is one of the three 2011 Joseph von Fraunhofer awards, given annually to the top researchers across Germany's mighty Fraunhofer Institutes. One of the best known of …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections

This topic is closed for new posts.

Friday 27th May 2011 10:45 GMT gautam

Nice

Now when can we have it on our current crop of phones?

0 0
Friday 27th May 2011 10:49 GMT Anonymous Coward

patents

Waste of time, surely Apple and/or Microsoft have patents on speech?

3 1
Friday 27th May 2011 10:49 GMT Giles Jones

Latency not the issue

It's not the latency, it is what happens when data goes missing. When you start compressing things and lose a small part of the data it results in big problems. If you've even opened a corrupted JPEG you'll know what I mean.

DAB is proof that slight errors in the signal result in a annoying garbled noise.

Currently you get a choppy audio which is better than clicks, pops and other annoyances.

0 0
1. Friday 27th May 2011 11:53 GMT Wize
  
  Depends how small your chunks are
  
  Bit like digital terrestrial TV. You drop out and your picture goes funny till the next new frame is sent. Making it shorter between frames makes it recover faster but increases the amount of data.
  
  Current phone data is sent in encrypted packets anyway. Lose a bit of an encrypted file and you have nothing anyway.
  
  0 0
Friday 27th May 2011 11:31 GMT NoneSuch

How much of that prize money...

...will have to be paid out in fines and legal fees for software patent violations...

1 1
1. Friday 27th May 2011 11:54 GMT Turk3y
  
  circular patent trolling? I think not
  
  as fraunhofer pretty much wrote the book on such codecs I doubt they will have to pay themselves much ;), but I suspect the other guys will have to pony up quite healthy sums to play with this.
  
  1 0
Friday 27th May 2011 12:11 GMT Anonymous Coward

Useless

What's wrong with the GSM codec? It's opensource, easy to compress and decompress, and uses around 8KB/s

2 0
1. Friday 27th May 2011 12:18 GMT Bade
  
  The ca$h
  
  Sisval cannot licence the sh1t out of it as they do with mp3...
  
  1 0
Friday 27th May 2011 14:05 GMT Identity

I like the fact...

that the guy who was so unsatisfied with the speed of the existing codec is named Schnell! And Markus (Mark?), to boot!

1 0
1. Friday 27th May 2011 14:16 GMT J 3
  
  Indeed!
  
  I was thinking the same, heh.
  
  I also brought to mind that scene of "Das Boot"... Schneller! Schneller!
  
  0 0
Friday 27th May 2011 15:19 GMT bwalzer

I think there is an (probably) open codec that does this sort of thing...

Opus (http://opus-codec.org/) is reputed to be low latency, robust in the face of errors and does music. There is even an ITEF draft for it out right now...

0 0
1. Sunday 29th May 2011 15:09 GMT Colin Miller
  
  Xiph's speex
  
  Speex, from Xiph, who invented Ogg-Vorbis is another lossy codec, this time optimised for speech.
  
  It uses 30 or 34 ms frames.
  
  http://www.speex.org/
  
  http://www.speex.org/docs/manual/speex-manual/node4.htm
  
  0 0
Friday 27th May 2011 15:37 GMT Christian Berger

A little introduction to German

The word "Fraunhofer" means "somebody who does fairly trivial things, but advertises them as big inventions".

So it's only understandable that it's nothing that special. Just like MP3 wasn't anything special back then.

0 1
1. Friday 27th May 2011 23:46 GMT Nightkiller
  
  Ahem
  
  I'm with YAAC on this one. "...MP3 wasn't anything special back then"? Maybe. Maybe not. It solved a problem for a lot of people when dialup at 56K WAS something special.
  
  0 0
Friday 27th May 2011 19:50 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward

MP3 trivial

That'll be why you invented it first then?

If you have a moment there are a whole bunch of complex time/space/complexity constrained problems we need advanced codecs for - the computer science community would be ever so grateful if you could solve all of them.

2 0