[Speex-dev] Speex development

[Ken Smith]

Basically, Speex is the brain child of Jean-Marc Valin, and from what I can
tell, he has since moved on to other projects, though he continues to
monitor this list.  So no, it's not really being developed anymore.  And
what's out there really is good enough for a great many applications.

That said, there remains room for improvement, mostly in the pre-processor
(the codec itself is very mature).  To take a few known issues:

(1) The main codec doesn't have full fixed point support for all of its
modes.
(2) The acoustic echo cancellation, in my experience, gives you real but far
from perfect echo cancellation.  (And a lot of theoretical work has been
done in that area since Valin coded it up in 2005.)
(3) The VAD for the pre-processor needs to be rewritten.  (The comments in
the code describe it as a "kludge".)
(4) I've found that the AGC in the preprocessor can act rather strangely at
times.
(5) The AGC in the pre-processor doesn't have fixed-point support.
(6) There are Java (JSpeex) and C# (CSpeex) ports, but they only implement
the codec, not the pre-processor, jitter buffer, AEC, or any of the other
parts of the Speex library.  It would be great if someone were to port the
remainder of the Speex library over to those environments.

I'm not really qualified to take on these jobs myself, but it would be great
if someone else with the right background who wanted to make a name for
themselves in this field was able to pick up where Valin left off.  (To be
clear: we're all very much in his debt.)

Ken Smith
Cell: 425-443-2359
Email: ken at alanta.com
Blog: http://blog.wouldbetheologian.com/


On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 11:02 PM, James Mbuthia <jmmbuthia at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Just wanted to know, is speex still being developed? I was going through
> the manual and its dated December 2007 for speex version 1.2 beta 3. As far
> as I can see there doesnt seem to be any new versions since then, is there
> any development work on speex?
>
> regards,
> James
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speex-dev mailing list
> Speex-dev at xiph.org
> http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/speex-dev
>
>
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