November 11, 2009

Broadcom Offers Open Source Voice Codecs

Broadcom Corporation is offering its BroadVoice family of voice codecs royalty-free and without any licensing fees to help drive a transition to HD voice-over IP (VoIP) applications.

Key Facts:

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Broadcom developed the BroadVoice family of voice codecs with two variants including a 32 kb/s version called BroadVoice32 for wideband (HD) speech sampled at 16 kHz, and a 16 kb/s version called BroadVoice16 for narrowband telephone-bandwidth speech sampled at 8 kHz.
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BroadVoice advanced voice codecs reduce the latency, complexity and bandwidth usage on a wide range of wideband and narrowband voice applications including voice-over-cable, voice-over-DSL, Ethernet IP phones, Wi-Fi VoIP phones and software-based VoIP client solutions.
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BroadVoice is available on Broadcom’s cable, DSL and VoIP system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions.
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When standardized by SCTE and ANSI, the BroadVoice16 and BroadVoice32 codecs are called BV16 and BV32, respectively.  BV16 is a standard codec in PacketCable 1.5, PacketCable 2.0, ANSI/SCTE 24-21 2006, and ITU-T Recommendation J.161 specifications. BV32 is a standard codec in PacketCable 2.0, ANSI/SCTE 24-23 2007, and ITU-T Recommendation J.361 specifications.
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Broadcom is providing both the floating-point and fixed-point C source code of BroadVoice16 and BroadVoice 32 under an open source license (LGPL version 2.1) and on a royalty-free basis.