H.324

Last updated
H.324
Terminal for low bit-rate multimedia communication
StatusIn force
Latest version5.0
April 2009
Organization ITU-T
Related standards G.711, G.722, G.723.1, 3G-324M
Website https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.324

H.324 is an ITU-T recommendation for voice, video and data transmission over regular analog phone lines. It uses a regular 33,600 bit/s modem for transmission, the H.263 codec for video encoding and G.723.1 for audio.

Contents

H.324 standard is formally known as Terminal for low bit-rate multimedia communication. H.324 covers the technical requirements for very low bit-rate multimedia telephone terminals operating over the General Switched Telephone Network (GSTN). H.324 terminals provide real-time video, audio, or data, or any combination, between two multimedia telephone terminals over a GSTN voice band network connection.

H.324 terminals offering audio communication shall support the G.723.1 audio codec. H.324 terminals offering video communication shall support the H.263 and H.261 video codecs. G.722.1 may be used for wideband audio applications. Annex G of H.324 specification defines usage of ISO/IEC 14496-1 (MPEG-4 Systems) generic capabilities in H.324 terminals. H.324/I terminals shall support interoperation with voice telephones using G.711 speech coding, if the connected network supports transmission and reception of G.711. Other modes such as G.722 audio may optionally be supported as well. [1]

H.324 was adapted by 3GPP to form 3G-324M.

It is for example used in the Vialta Beamer BM-80 Phone Video Station, the MINX system from Datapoint Corporation, and in several other videophones.

See also

Related Research Articles

H.263 is a video compression standard originally designed as a low-bit-rate compressed format for videotelephony. It was standardized by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) in a project ending in 1995/1996. It is a member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T.

Speech coding is an application of data compression to digital audio signals containing speech. Speech coding uses speech-specific parameter estimation using audio signal processing techniques to model the speech signal, combined with generic data compression algorithms to represent the resulting modeled parameters in a compact bitstream.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">G.723.1</span> ITU-T Recommendation

G.723.1 is an audio codec for voice that compresses voice audio in 30 ms frames. An algorithmic look-ahead of 7.5 ms duration means that total algorithmic delay is 37.5 ms. Its official name is Dual rate speech coder for multimedia communications transmitting at 5.3 and 6.3 kbit/s. It is sometimes associated with a Truespeech trademark in coprocessors produced by DSP Group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">G.711</span> ITU-T recommendation

G.711 is a narrowband audio codec originally designed for use in telephony that provides toll-quality audio at 64 kbit/s. It is an ITU-T standard (Recommendation) for audio encoding, titled Pulse code modulation (PCM) of voice frequencies released for use in 1972.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">G.729</span> ITU-T Recommendation

G.729 is a royalty-free narrow-band vocoder-based audio data compression algorithm using a frame length of 10 milliseconds. It is officially described as Coding of speech at 8 kbit/s using code-excited linear prediction speech coding (CS-ACELP), and was introduced in 1996. The wide-band extension of G.729 is called G.729.1, which equals G.729 Annex J.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">G.722</span> ITU-T recommendation

G.722 is an ITU-T standard 7 kHz wideband audio codec operating at 48, 56 and 64 kbit/s. It was approved by ITU-T in November 1988. Technology of the codec is based on sub-band ADPCM (SB-ADPCM). The corresponding narrow-band codec based on the same technology is G.726.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">G.726</span> ITU-T Recommendation

G.726 is an ITU-T ADPCM speech codec standard covering the transmission of voice at rates of 16, 24, 32, and 40 kbit/s. It was introduced to supersede both G.721, which covered ADPCM at 32 kbit/s, and G.723, which described ADPCM for 24 and 40 kbit/s. G.726 also introduced a new 16 kbit/s rate. The four bit rates associated with G.726 are often referred to by the bit size of a sample, which are 2, 3, 4, and 5-bits respectively. The corresponding wide-band codec based on the same technology is G.722.

H.320 or Narrow-band visual telephone systems and terminal equipment is an umbrella Recommendation by the ITU-T for running multimedia (audio/video/data) over ISDN based networks. The main protocols in this suite are H.221, H.230, H.242, audio codecs such as G.711 (PCM) and G.728 (CELP), and discrete cosine transform (DCT) video codecs such as H.261 and H.263.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">3G-324M</span>

3G-324M is the 3GPP umbrella protocol for video telephony in 3G mobile networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">H.323</span> Audio-visual communication signaling protocol

H.323 is a recommendation from the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) that defines the protocols to provide audio-visual communication sessions on any packet network. The H.323 standard addresses call signaling and control, multimedia transport and control, and bandwidth control for point-to-point and multi-point conferences.

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Wideband audio, also known as wideband voice or HD voice, is high definition voice quality for telephony audio, contrasted with standard digital telephony "toll quality". It extends the frequency range of audio signals transmitted over telephone lines, resulting in higher quality speech. The range of the human voice extends from 100 Hz to 17 kHz but traditional, voiceband or narrowband telephone calls limit audio frequencies to the range of 300 Hz to 3.4 kHz. Wideband audio relaxes the bandwidth limitation and transmits in the audio frequency range of 50 Hz to 7 kHz. In addition, some wideband codecs may use a higher audio bit depth of 16 bits to encode samples, also resulting in much better voice quality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">G.718</span> ITU-T Recommendation

G.718 is an ITU-T Recommendation embedded scalable speech and audio codec providing high quality narrowband speech over the lower bit rates and high quality wideband speech over the complete range of bit rates. In addition, G.718 is designed to be highly robust to frame erasures, thereby enhancing the speech quality when used in Internet Protocol (IP) transport applications on fixed, wireless and mobile networks. Despite its embedded nature, the codec also performs well with both narrowband and wideband generic audio signals. The codec has an embedded scalable structure, enabling maximum flexibility in the transport of voice packets through IP networks of today and in future media-aware networks. In addition, the embedded structure of G.718 will easily allow the codec to be extended to provide a superwideband and stereo capability through additional layers which are currently under development in ITU-T Study Group 16. The bitstream may be truncated at the decoder side or by any component of the communication system to instantaneously adjust the bit rate to the desired value without the need for out-of-band signalling. The encoder produces an embedded bitstream structured in five layers corresponding to the five available bit rates: 8, 12, 16, 24 & 32 kbit/s.

Adaptive differential pulse-code modulation (ADPCM) is a variant of differential pulse-code modulation (DPCM) that varies the size of the quantization step, to allow further reduction of the required data bandwidth for a given signal-to-noise ratio.

Total conversation is an ITU standard of simultaneous video, voice and text service in telecommunications. Total conversation allows people in two or more locations to: (a) see each other, (b) hear each other, and (c) conduct a text interaction with each other, or choose to communicate with any combination of those three modes and to do so in real-time.

References