Skype Announces Silk Voip Wideband Codec
With a view to making its image stronger in the VOIP market, Skype has
announced the release of a new voice codec code-named SILK. This new
application is a designed and developed default audio codec for all
Skype-to-Skype calls.
The SILK scales its bandwidth usage in real time between 6 Kpbs and 40
Kbps, and in “superwideband” (best) mode samples at 24 KHz. Likewise,
bit rate scales from 6-40 Kbps as dictated by connection conditions.
Other SILK focus Includes provision of real-time bandwidth scalability
to enable them to deal with degraded and unfavourable network
conditions; balancing codec optimization between voice, music and
background noise. An imbalance between any of these three can have
really have an adverse impact on the overall user experience.
It is also expected that it will deliver a robust solution which would
deliver a more consistent audio experience, irrespective of the
network conditions and an individual user’s voice signature.
SILK version was notable as being capable of narrowband (8KHz), wide
band (16KHz) and super-wideband (24KHz) sample rates. Skype claims
that the codec dynamically adapts both sample rate and bitrate in
response to the variable network quality. They have published a PDF
with a very general overiew of codec performance expressed in terms of
bitrates, CPU requirements and MOS scores.
According to Skype , Silk can run on x86 chipsets for Windows,
Macintosh and Linux systems, and the software has been run on Arm and
MIPS chip platforms.
In addition to Skype 4.0 for Windows, the high-quality codec is
available on Macintosh beta version 2.8, with a final Mac version
coming in April. Linux is on a similar timeline.
The company is making the codec freely available to the third-party
developers so that they can use it in any device or application, with
or without Skype.
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