Re: [tlug] 7/10 TLUG Technical Meeting - voice communication questions

[David Santinoli <u235@example.com>]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 02:06:52AM -0700, Jake Morrison wrote:
> 
> GSM is free and low bandwidth (around 5 kbps), but is low quality.

Speaking of GSM 06.10, the bandwidth required is 13 kbit/s, not 5.

Moreover, there's a freely available software implementation, true, but
its mere existence does not imply no patent issues:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Patent Issues with GSM 06.10

Philips is claiming intellectual property on GSM 06.10. They haven't
contacted the authors of this library, but at least two large companies
that wanted to integrate GSM 06.10 codecs into their products have been
approached; one decided to pull their codec, another to pull just the
encoder and leave the decoder. (So, apparently, at least some lawyers
think the intellectual property applies only to one half of the
process.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
(from http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/toast.html)

Looks similar to FFmpeg's caveat about MPEG-4.

Cheers
 David
-- 
 David Santinoli, Milano             +   <david@example.com>
 Independent Linux/Unix consultant   +   http://www.santinoli.com