10 November 2009, 15:38

Broadcom offers LGPL Voice Codecs

Broadcom have announced that they are releasing their BroadVoice, wideband and narrowband voice codecs as LGPL 2.1 licensed open source. BroadVoice, which is comprised of BroadVoice32, a 16kHz sampled 32kb per second codec, and BroadVoice16, a 8kHz sampled 16kb per second codec, will be made available as C source code in both fixed and floating point implementations. The fixed point version of the codec should make it easier to use BroadVoice on hand held and mobile devices with limited processing power.

Broadcom point out that this will make the codecs free of royalty and licensing fees. Broadcom believe that the lack of a royalty free codec has inhibited the move to high definition Voice over IP and say that the BroadVoice codecs are being open sourced as a direct response to customer demand for an option with the maximum flexibility. The company plans to maintain control of the BroadVoice trademark with the aim of maintaining bit-stream compatibility in future versions of the BroadVoice codec.

The source code is available from the BroadVoice support page, with demonstration samples, documentation and papers on the codec.

(djwm)

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