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Opus Audio Codec – FAQ

wiki.xiph.org

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Re: Opus Audio Codec – FAQ

#11

Post by gruez »

TylerE wrote: post #4
xellisx wrote: post #3

Site has been hugged. On another point, is Opus a popular format, given that alot of people now stream stuff mostly? IIRC, some of the Quake engines support it.

I have never seen an Opus file in the wild. MP3 and FLAC are by far still dominant. Ogg is still popular I. It’s niche (eg game sounds, and I think Spotify uses it too)

Is there a reason why mp3 is still around? AAC has better compression ratios, and support is a non-issue. Maybe mp3 has better brand recognition? Most people know what a mp3 is, but probably wouldn't know what AAC or a .m4a is.

Re: Opus Audio Codec – FAQ

#12

Post by prvc »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #10
xellisx wrote: post #3

Site has been hugged. On another point, is Opus a popular format, given that alot of people now stream stuff mostly? IIRC, some of the Quake engines support it.

Opus is the standard audio codec in WebM, alongside VP9 or AV1 video.

AV1 does not appear to have been added yet

Re: Opus Audio Codec – FAQ

#13

Post by derf_ »

lozf wrote: post #8

The only point in lossy encoding is to save space / bandwidth . Opus excels at getting good sound quality at lower bitrates. If there's a talk or lecture on Youtube that you're about to grab, try the 50kbps Opus version and save your limited space for more important things, but you might need to remux from webm to an ogg container for compatibility. e.g. youtube-dl -f249 $URL --exec 'ffmpeg -i {} -vn -c:a copy {}.ogg…

You can replace the --exec 'ffmpeg ...' with just -x (or the long form --extract-audio).

Re: Opus Audio Codec – FAQ

#14

Post by lozf »

gruez wrote: post #11
TylerE wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never seen an Opus file in the wild. MP3 and FLAC are by far still dominant. Ogg is still popular I. It’s niche (eg game sounds, and I think Spotify uses it too)

Is there a reason why mp3 is still around? AAC has better compression ratios, and support is a non-issue. Maybe mp3 has better brand recognition? Most people know what a mp3 is, but probably wouldn't know what AAC or a .m4a is.

The roll-out of AAC (which was designed to address the problems with MP3, but was not backwards compatible) was slowed a bit by expensive licensing fees for hardware manufacturers and the lack of a good free encoder (though there were some very poor implementations)...

By the time this was sorted MP3 had gained massive popularity on "teh scene" and was soon followed by napster etc - the rest is history, so yes it's all about the "brand recognition" now sadly.

Most people could have a better sounding music collection in about half the size required for MP3 safely... still at least disk space is cheap these days.

The unfixable problem of MP3s "shortest allowable blocksize" causing audible smearing on transients will be with us until the format is abandoned, but I won't hold my breath.

These days for the best quality lossy audio you want AAC-LC encoded with either Apples encoder or the open source FDK-AAC by Fraunhofer (developed for Android) but fully cross platform... or Opus for a completely free and open codec , but still not yet as widely compatible.

Re: Opus Audio Codec – FAQ

#15

Post by lozf »

derf_ wrote: post #13
lozf wrote: post #8

The only point in lossy encoding is to save space / bandwidth . Opus excels at getting good sound quality at lower bitrates. If there's a talk or lecture on Youtube that you're about to grab, try the 50kbps Opus version and save your limited space for more important things, but you might need to remux from webm to an ogg container for compatibility. e.g. youtube-dl -f249 $URL --exec 'ffmpeg -i {} -vn -c:a copy {}.ogg…

You can replace the --exec 'ffmpeg ...' with just -x (or the long form --extract-audio).

Yes, but with opus, that only put's the audio in a .opus container, which isn't as widely compatible as the .ogg container.

Re: Opus Audio Codec – FAQ

#16

Post by jumelles »

lozf wrote: post #14
gruez wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason why mp3 is still around? AAC has better compression ratios, and support is a non-issue. Maybe mp3 has better brand recognition? Most people know what a mp3 is, but probably wouldn't know what AAC or a .m4a is.

The roll-out of AAC (which was designed to address the problems with MP3, but was not backwards compatible) was slowed a bit by expensive licensing fees for hardware manufacturers and the lack of a good free encoder (though there were some very poor implementations)... By the time this was sorted MP3 had gained massive popularity on "teh scene" and was soon followed by napster etc - the rest is history, so yes it's a…

> massive popularity on "teh scene"

More than that - scene releases required MP3 (LAME V2 IIRC) to be used.

Re: Opus Audio Codec – FAQ

#17

Post by derf_ »

lozf wrote: post #15
derf_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can replace the --exec 'ffmpeg ...' with just -x (or the long form --extract-audio).

Yes, but with opus, that only put's the audio in a .opus container, which isn't as widely compatible as the .ogg container.

It is literally the same bits. Feel free to change the extension if that helps (it does on some old Android versions, for sure).

Source: I am a co-author on RFC 6716 and RFC 7845.

Re: Opus Audio Codec – FAQ

#18

Post by powersnail »

xellisx wrote: post #3

Site has been hugged. On another point, is Opus a popular format, given that alot of people now stream stuff mostly? IIRC, some of the Quake engines support it.

My experience of using youtube-dl is that the best audio format to download from Youtube and Youtube Music seems to be opus usually. So, even if people don't consciously choose opus, they probably listened to opus files quite often.

Re: Opus Audio Codec – FAQ

#19

Post by knaik94 »

lozf wrote: post #8

The only point in lossy encoding is to save space / bandwidth . Opus excels at getting good sound quality at lower bitrates. If there's a talk or lecture on Youtube that you're about to grab, try the 50kbps Opus version and save your limited space for more important things, but you might need to remux from webm to an ogg container for compatibility. e.g. youtube-dl -f249 $URL --exec 'ffmpeg -i {} -vn -c:a copy {}.ogg…

If you have youtube-dl and ffmpeg installed together on linux or both executables in the same directory on windows, youtube-dl automatically remuxes "incompatible" formats into an mkv file.

Re: Opus Audio Codec – FAQ

#20

Post by knaik94 »

TylerE wrote: post #4
xellisx wrote: post #3

Site has been hugged. On another point, is Opus a popular format, given that alot of people now stream stuff mostly? IIRC, some of the Quake engines support it.

I have never seen an Opus file in the wild. MP3 and FLAC are by far still dominant. Ogg is still popular I. It’s niche (eg game sounds, and I think Spotify uses it too)

Whatsapp audio messages are encoded in opus.
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