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Summary
There are many different file types used for audio.
What is OPUS?
OPUS is a modern, high-fidelity, real-time, royalty-free, and open-sourceaudio codec.
Hannah Stryker / How-To Geek
Because of its hybrid design, it’s well-suited for both speech and music applications.
Who Makes It?
Producing the official OPUS standard was a joint effort between two unlikely collaborators.
CELT (Constrained Energy Lapped Transform) was first developed by Jean-Marc Valin of Xiph.org in 2007.
There were high delay, high latency codecs such as MP3, Vorbis, and AAC.
It was intended as a replacement for their currently usedSVOPCaudio codec, which was also developed in-house.
It was submitted to theIETFin July 2009, which is when Jean-Marc noticed the project.
To both of their surprise, CELT and SILK actually complimented each other quite nicely.
Who Uses It?
OPUS may just be the most popular audio codec you’ve never heard of.
Countless other platforms, commercial and independent streaming radio stations, and other projects use OPUS.
TheIcecastopen-source media streaming server, also developed by Xiph.org, supports OPUS as its preferred audio codec.
The Ogg Container Format
OPUS data contains digitally encoded audio and not much else.
it’s possible for you to think of a container like a box.
It allows you to put multiple separate things inside of it.
On the outside of the box is a label that describes everything inside.
Some container formats you’ve probably heard of before areTARandZIP, which are general-purpose archive files.
An Ogg container file may contain any number of independent streams.
These streams can be for video, audio, text and/or metadata.
It’s a common misconception that Ogg containers are fully synonymous with Vorbis audio.
OPUS audio was designed to be encapsulated in Ogg containers (specified as: audio/ogg; codecs=opus).
It has native support for these types of files and online grid streams, including those produced by Icecast.
It’s also free to download.
You canget the VLC player directly from the VideoLAN websiteor your operating system’spackage manager.
