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April 14, 2014

Artesyn Integrates Support for Opus, SILK Audio Codecs into SharpMedia PCIE-8120


As the number of devices we use grows, and the volume of media streaming on those devices continues to increase, more pressure is placed on the networks and service providers to deliver on these demands with reliability, scalability and quality. Artesyn Embedded Technologies, a provider of power conversion and embedded computing solutions, offers solutions that help meet those demands with cost-effective products and technology.

By integrating support for Opus and SILK audio codecs into its PCI Express media processing acceleration card (now SharpMedia PCIE-8120), Atesyn now supports large-scale deployments of applications such as OTT network services and WebRTC gateways.

The audio codecs are open-source and designed for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet, as well as storage and streaming applications. Opus was selected back in 2012 at an IETF meeting as an audio standard for WebRTC – unfortunately, the video part was not as easily resolved, and is still under development today. Tech specifics of Opus include:

  • It’s a royalty-free codec defined by IETF RFC 6176
  • It supports constant and variable bitrate encoding from 6 kbit/s to 510 kbit/s, frame sizes from 2.5 ms to 60 ms, and various sampling rates from 8 kHz (with 4 kHz bandwidth) to 48 kHz (with 20 kHz bandwidth, where the entire hearing range of the human auditory system can be reproduced)

The codecs can be used for a variety of audio applications, including VoIP, video conferencing, in-game chat and remote live music performances. It can scale from low bit-rate narrowband speech to very high-quality stereo music.

With this new integration into PCIE-8210, network equipment providers can add high density, highly scalable voice and video processing to network applications using less space, less power and at a lower cost than adding more servers or reducing performance. PCIE-8210 can integrate voice and video processing in a rack mounted server or other network appliances that have full size PCI express slots.

The media processing accelerator chip uses digital signal processors (DSP) to provide direct offload of the host CPU and use PCIE-8120 to take the place of additional servers when adding voice and video processing to an applications. It’s suited to session border controllers, media gateways, media servers, video/content optimization, video communications services and IVR systems.

"The addition of these codecs underlines our continued development of this innovative product line and demonstrates our ongoing commitment to introduce new technologies into this application space," said Linsey Miller, director of marketing for server acceleration, Artesyn Embedded Technologies, in a statement. "We are actively monitoring the mandatory video codec discussions happening in the IETF to ensure maximum interoperability for WebRTC-based deployments."

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Edited by Alisen Downey
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