Some of you many on even know what a codec is or why it is important to collaboration. A codec is a piece of software that does both encoding and decoding of a data stream. Codecs are most often found in both the video conferencing and audio conferencing world. For many of the collaboration tools you commonly use today you may not even be aware of the codec involved as many vendors OEM this piece of software rather than build it (smart move). On2 has one of the more popular codecs and Facebook, Sony, and Texas Instruments all use it. Global IP Solutions or (GIPS) offers both video and audio (VoIP) codecs that are used by many other vendors (Radvision, Sony-Ericsson uses it for their Smartphones, Yahoo! and even IBM uses it in their SameTime product).

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The algorithms in the codec determine the clarity of the voice you hear in VoIP, the number of packets dropped in the data stream or the resolution of the video windows you use in a video conference. Without getting into too much additional detail, I recently had a small Canadian company (Bradon Technologies Ltd.) demonstrate a new codec through their web conferencing tool SavviDeskTM. This codec was built for voice transmissions over unstable, high latency networks like the Internet. This codec is frame-independent, that means that each frame is encoded and decoded independently of past frames. Every packet that arrives can be perfectly reconstructed immediately. The codec utilizes 4 kHz frequency band range, delivers excellent voice quality with 4 bit rates (2.4/4.8/9.6/19.2 Kbps) and a sampling rate of 8 kHz.

There was a small download to start (about 400k) which did not stay on my desktop after the web conference was over. The VoIP interactions were very clear, even with 3 of us on the call and all talking over each other (I am from NY). The video was also good, and could be set by the conference administrator to a variety of different resolutions, and worked pretty flawlessly. Evidently one of the scientists that worked on this codec was originally from Xerox PARC (the same people that made Placeware, which is now Microsoft LiveMeeting).

SavviDesk should be running on a Mac later this summer and is also being integrated with IBM’s Websphere. Like other web conferencing tools it can be used for distance meetings or training and allows you share rich media (videos) as well as do video conferencing and VoIP conferencing. One of the true tests of a codec is how well it runs on low bandwidth and firewalled environments. For many video vendors that were using the T.120 stack in their product, transmission across a firewall was almost impossible and these products worked much better in high bandwidth (read expensive) environments.

SavviDesk also allows you to use you desktop phone to dial into a web meeting (iPBX) which is a nice feature that I have only seen a few other web conferencing vendors support. SavviDesk also provides some event management functions and integrates with Outlook, but where it really shines is offering the VoIP features from its codec including:

• Group VoIP Discussion
• Scalable Audio Compression
• Acoustic Echo Canceller (AEC)
• Automatic Gain Control (AGC)
• Voice Activity Detection (VAD)
• Comfort Noise Generation (CNG)
• Audience Voice Management
• Voice Activity Indicator

If this blog has piqued your interest, try SavviDesk, or if you are a collaboration vendor and want to get a higher quality VoIP engine you might want to take a look at this new codec.