Yes, the Opus codec is outstanding, providing excellent audio quality at lower bitrates than its competitors, even with music. It also won two blind listening tests, one at 96Kb/s, and another at 64Kb/s, beating AAC, Ogg Vorbis, and of course, MP3.

64Kb/s: http://listening-tests.hydrogenaud.io/igorc/results.html
96Kb/s: http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm

Unfortunately, Opus is STILL not supported in Internet Explorer. Firefox, Chrome, and Opera all support Opus (and Ogg Vorbis) HTML5 audio playback. As I write this, Microsoft has a suggestions portal where you can vote for features you would like to see in their productions.

I am not sure what the answer to this question is, especially when concealment is done across the stack – from the network later, through the audio algorithms to the voice codec itself.

I believe it is for voice.

Apples and Oranges.

Opus is ahead of the curve of most codecs, especially an old one like G.729. Check this link: http://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/

MP3 has a very high delay that is not suitable for real-time communication. Also it has inferior quality compared to Opus 🙂

The video taught me that after the success of the Opus codec and the codec working group at the IETF. Mozilla and Xiph (and others ?) are working on Daala as the basis for a video codec working group in the IETF. That is something to keep a eye on.

All true of course.

2 years ago, when we looked for which voice codecs to support, the list had to usually include G.711, G.729, G.722 and potentially G.719. From there it degraded to iLBC, iSAC and SILK – the idea was to cover all basis.

Today? For something brand new, I’d go for G.711 and Opus and be done with it. I know this limits a lot in the area of interoperability, but it simplifies so much that for most uses it is the best approach.

I find it very encouraging that Opus is gaining so much traction and adoption already.