TwinVQ

TwinVQ is a proprietary lossy audio data compression format developed by the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) . In the late 1990s, the technology was bought up by Yamaha and marketed under the name "SoundVQ" in its own encoder . The filename extension is .vqf. The format is described in Part 3 of the MPEG-4 standard ( ISO / IEC 14496-3).

TwinVQ uses a unique coding technology, vector quantization (VQ). It does not support variable, but only constant bit rates at 80, 96, 112, 128, 160 and 192 kbit / s, and a maximum of two channels ( stereo ). According to the manufacturer, TwinVQ files should be around 30 to 35% smaller than MP3 files and have a similar quality, but there is no evidence for this. Due to the higher complexity, a higher processor load should be required for decoding.

Yamaha marketed TwinVQ as an alternative to MP3, but the format never became very popular. This could be due to the proprietary nature of the format - third-party programs were rare and there was no hardware support. With the emergence of other MP3 alternatives, TwinVQ quickly became superfluous due to its limitations and the lack of support by software and hardware and is now considered dead. However, it is anchored as one of several audio data compression methods in the MPEG-4 format.

Some programs still support TwinVQ. NTT also maintains a website on which its own playback and coding software is available, Nero Burning ROM can encode in TwinVQ, Winamp supports it via an additional module and with foobar2000 you can also use Nero plug-in via Nero's codec TwinVQ- Play files (Nero installation required). Further software that TwinVQ supported, but is no longer developed, are Yamaha's encoder and player as well as the " K-Jöfol audio player".

The format was in 2009 by the FFmpeg project reverse-engineered so that the decoding of vqf files from the open source - software libavcodec is supported.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ TwinVQ decoder source code . Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved August 23, 2009. 

Web links

• A TwinVQ program collection ( Memento from February 9, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
• The TwinVQ add-on module for Winamp (English)