Opus Audio Codec Approved As New IETF Standard

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has approved of Opus as a new audio codec standard via RFC 6716.

Opus audio has been talked about before on Phoronix as an interesting open-source audio codec that effectively pairs Skype's SILC codec with the CELT codec from Xiph.Org. Mozilla, Skype, Google, Broadcom, and other organizations have been involved with the Opus development. Opus has many potential use-cases from VoIP software to online gaming and music streaming.

The news now is that the Internet Engineering Task Force has approved of Opus for becoming the next audio standard via RFC 6716. "This document defines the Opus interactive speech and audio codec. Opus is designed to handle a wide range of interactive audio applications, including Voice over IP, videoconferencing, in-game chat, and even live, distributed music performances. It scales from low bitrate narrowband speech at 6 kbit/s to very high quality stereo music at 510 kbit/s. Opus uses both Linear Prediction (LP) and the Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (MDCT) to achieve good compression of both speech and music."

Opus supports bit-rates from 6kb/s to 512kb/s, voice and music, mono and stereo, narrowband (8 kHZ) to full-band (48 kHz), and frame-sizes from 2.5ms to 60ms. The Opus audio codec is very versatile.

More information on the approval of Opus by IETF can be found from this Mozilla Hacks blog post.