While I am of course very happy about the progress we are making in projects like GStreamer and Telepathy in regards to supporting all kind of formats and protocols, the thing we do care the most about here at Collabora is free codecs. I guess I often tend to talk in this blog about the more playback oriented parts of that puzzle, like Vorbis, Theora and Dirac, but there is another equally important field where free codecs have an important role to play and that is for communication. Collabora has already spent significant resources to ensure that Empathy can do video conferencing using Speex and Theora, but we feel that is just the beginning of what can be achieved.

This is why we are very happy at Collabora to send out this position paper in support of a new IETF working group to define some free and open codecs targeted at voice over IP and similar solutions. Building on the existing work done in the form of Speex and CELT, I am sure great standardized solutions can be found in this field by the IETF through such a working group.

Together with the effort behind pushing free formats through the Firefox, Opera and Chrome HTML support this is another step forward in making free formats viable and major players in the codec field.

So once again be sure to check out our position statement on getting IETF to set up a work group for this.