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-   -   "HD Voice" rolling out on Orange UK (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=61510)

Milhouse 2010-09-01 03:46
"HD Voice" rolling out on Orange UK
 
Speech quality using the "HD Voice" (aka AMR-WB / G.722.2 codec) is much improved - listen for yourself in this BBC News story (possibly UK only).

The question is: does the N900 support the AMR-WB codec?

My web searches so far seem to suggest that the N900 does not support this voice codec, which is a great shame particularly as AMR-WB has been around at least 10 years (possibly longer, since 1998).

The latest Android phones (Moto Droid etc.) and forthcoming Nokia N8 seem to have support for AMR-WB, but not Nokias current flagship. :(

nidO 2010-09-01 09:41
Re: "HD Voice" rolling out on Orange UK
 
1) The N900 is not, and never has been, Nokia's "flagship".

2) The N900 does have an AMR-WB encoder and decoder installed. Whether this specifically includes G.722.2 for GSM however, i'd have no idea.

superhero 2010-09-01 09:56
Re: "HD Voice" rolling out on Orange UK
 
I'm guessing its installed but like all other features we have to wait for this forums geniuses to enable it for us. that is if it works. lucky uk. since for me in usa i use tmobile and now and then is it gets so bad that i don't hear anything(but still better then att). but its not the N900 fault i guess...

No hatin... :):)

zarf 2010-09-01 10:05
Re: "HD Voice" rolling out on Orange UK
 
Even if it isn't implemented in the DSP (which I have no idea to the answer), the N900 cpu is plenty fast enough to soft decode / encode to this codec.

So, what we're missing is a client that talks to Orange HD surely...

shadowjk 2010-09-01 11:48
Re: "HD Voice" rolling out on Orange UK
 
I thought every other civilized operator had this enabled already...

Milhouse 2010-09-01 14:43
Re: "HD Voice" rolling out on Orange UK
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by nidO (Post 804021)
1) The N900 is not, and never has been, Nokia's "flagship".
So if the N900 isn't Nokias current flagship phone, what is - the N97? Sorry, the N900 is the current "top of the line" Nokia device until the N8 launches, and even that has inferior hardware in all respects apart from the camera.

A better demonstration of the HD Voice difference here (should be available to everyone, not just UK):

http://vimeo.com/12667577

(Related news article here from when Orange were performing a limited trial of HD Voice about 2 months ago).

lma 2010-09-01 16:15
Re: "HD Voice" rolling out on Orange UK
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Milhouse (Post 803844)
Speech quality using the "HD Voice" (aka AMR-WB / G.722.2 codec) is much improved
IMHO it's a bit of a marketing gimmick at this stage. I played with it some months ago with Snom equipment and it sounds great when it's supported end-to-end, but most of the rest of the world can only support 8KHz 8-bit PCM at best.

Quote:
The question is: does the N900 support the AMR-WB codec?
IIRC it came with gstreamer plugins for it, but wasn't advertising the codec in SIP SDPs. No idea what it does for cellular calls.

Milhouse 2010-09-01 17:53
Re: "HD Voice" rolling out on Orange UK
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by lma (Post 804351)
IMHO it's a bit of a marketing gimmick at this stage. I played with it some months ago with Snom equipment and it sounds great when it's supported end-to-end, but most of the rest of the world can only support 8KHz 8-bit PCM at best.
I guess they have to start somewhere and to be fair they have been pretty upfront about it only working between HD-enabled handsets. Although I'm still not sure why it won't work between an HD-enabled handset and a POTS landline - presumably this is a cellular network limitation when interfacing with POTS?

lma 2010-09-04 05:08
Re: "HD Voice" rolling out on Orange UK
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Milhouse (Post 804433)
I guess they have to start somewhere and to be fair they have been pretty upfront about it only working between HD-enabled handsets.
Sure, that was a general comment on HD audio rather than this particular offering.


Quote:
Although I'm still not sure why it won't work between an HD-enabled handset and a POTS landline - presumably this is a cellular network limitation when interfacing with POTS?
Potentially that too, but more fundamentally it's a limitation of the POTS side (wires, handsets etc) which is only specced to handle "narrowband", and that is more often than not enforced by digitising the audio to ISDN (ie G.711) as soon as it leaves the "last mile".

BTW, it seems even the N8x0s came with some AMR-WB support:

Code:
Nokia-N810-43-7:/lib/dsp/modules# ls -l amrw*
-rw-r--r--    1 root    root          751 Aug 22  2008 amrwb.cmd
-rw-r--r--    1 root    root        13089 Aug 22  2008 amrwb.o
though they're not used in SIP either (disabled in /etc/farsight/gstcodecs.conf, and there are no corresponding gstreamer modules as far as I can see).

shadowjk 2010-09-04 08:44
Re: "HD Voice" rolling out on Orange UK
 
amr is often used in .mp4/.3gp/.3gp2 files

Milhouse 2010-09-04 13:48
Re: "HD Voice" rolling out on Orange UK
 
Orange customers can roam to the T-Mobile network from 5 October, initially as an opt-in service. Orange also confirmed in the same announcement that HD Voice would be rolled out across the T-Mobile network.


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