By Doug Mohney, on June 23rd, 2010
Tom Keating over at TMC has announced the appearance of a dual-stack Skype and SIP phone, the Grandstream GXV3140 IP multimedia phone.
The Grandstream GXV3140 reportedly gets SIP support through a firmware upgrade, enabling the phone to support both Skype voice and video calls in addition to SIP-based voice and video calls.
Features of the GXV3140 include [...]
By Doug Mohney, on June 1st, 2010
Over the weekend Skype (www.skype.com) announced Skype for iPhone 2.0. Among the features listed in the new release were “near CD quality” sound for Skype-to-Skype calls with the use of the SILK codec – if you have the right hardware. The big deals in the announcements were calls being available over a 3G connection annnnd [...]
By Doug Mohney, on April 20th, 2010
The Financial Times (FT) caught Skype CTO Jonathan Rosenberg at eComm yesterday touting the virtues of HD voice and the SILK superwideband codec and noted the HD Voice Summit at 2010 CES.
Rosenberg presented data showing that users talk almost 50 percent longer when using HD voice as compared to G.729. He also underlined what [...]
By Doug Mohney, on March 9th, 2010
Credit where credit is due: @voiploser and Michael Graves provided this tip
In its latest filing with the ITEF, Skype (www.skype.com) released the source code to SILK under an open license, with the code presented as an appendix to the filing.
Codec junkies can review “draft-vos-silk-01” at http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vos-silk-01, with the fixed-point C code starting at page 28 [...]
By Doug Mohney, on February 25th, 2010
Skype’s (www.skype.com) march to conquer the living room and consumers continues. Samsung and Skype announced that Samsung’s latest and greatest broadband HDTVs will feature embedded Skype software for voice and video calls.
The new Samsung LED 7000 and 8000 series models are shipping with Skype software today in Korea and worldwide in the first half of [...]
By Doug Mohney, on November 12th, 2009
Speaking of alternatives to G.722, a startup called Voxygen is delivering a free, private push-to-talk-service called Babbelon. The concept isn’t new, but it uses Skype’s SILK “super wideband” audio codec and is hosted over on Rackspace.
Babbelon is a browser-based VoIP chat tool and provides a “massively” multi-user VoIP service; according to the press release, Babbleon [...]
By Doug Mohney, on October 27th, 2009
In a release schedule to hit the wires tomorrow, Voxbone is announcing that its iNum service now supports HD between “dozens” of VoIP networks and Skype, with the ability to translate between Skype’s wideband SILK codec and the more dominant G.722 codec/standard.
Voxbone’s iNum service has its own international “country” code — 883 — and calls [...]
By Doug Mohney, on September 10th, 2009
Next week at HD Comm ’09 (special discount of 20% if you use the code “HDConnectNow”), Julian Spittka, Product Manager and Sr. Engineer, Skype will be speaking in the afternoon around the topic of “The Path to HD Market Adoption.” He’ll no doubt talk about the wonders of SILK, but what else might he reveal?
With [...]
By Doug Mohney, on September 5th, 2009
Announcements of the “official” Skype for Asterisk gateway and Skype’s liberation from eBay didn’t prevent developers at IT EXPO from wondering where code to access Skype’s much-hyped SILK codec was.
Introduced on March 3, 2009 and billed as “available for a royalty free license by third-party software and hardware developers soon, developers have been waiting for [...]