… for Codecs & Media

Tip #1437: What are Vorbis or Opus Codecs?

Larry Jordan – LarryJordan.com

Both codecs support high-quality streaming audio.

WebM is a container format that uses VP8 or VP9 codecs for video and Vorbis or Opus codecs for audio. So, what are these audio codecs?

VORBIS

Developed by Xiph.org, Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format for mid to high quality (8kHz-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel. This places Vorbis in the same competitive class as audio representations such as MPEG-4 (AAC), and similar to, but higher performance than MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (TwinVQ), WMA and PAC.

The bitstream format for Vorbis I was frozen Monday, May 8th 2000. All bitstreams encoded since will remain compatible with all future releases of Vorbis.

Link: https://xiph.org/vorbis/faq/

OPUS

Developed by opus-codec.org, Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet, but is also intended for storage and streaming applications. It is standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as RFC 6716 which incorporated technology from Skype’s SILK codec and Xiph.Org’s CELT codec.

Link: https://opus-codec.org