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Firefox Beta 15 supports the new Opus audio format

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Re: Firefox Beta 15 supports the new Opus audio format

#71

Post by slowpoke »

azakai wrote: post #24
teraflop wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are the terms of the license, I think: http://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/1602/ Notice that permission is only given for implementations that comply with the specification. (And if Skype ever infringes any of your patents, you can't sue them without losing the rights to Opus.) Whether or not you agree with Skype's moral right to its patents, this is clearly a limitation of developers' freedom. Imagine if HTTP were…

Thanks for the link. > Notice that permission is only given for implementations that comply with the specification. That's typical - otherwise, you could implement some almost arbitrary protocol but say it was this one (and use a small amount of it) and claim that you were shielded from Skype's patents. The patent license is just for this particular codec. Of course there are issues with this, it's been debated a lot…

>That's typical - otherwise, you could implement some almost arbitrary protocol but say it was this one (and use a small amount of it) and claim that you were shielded from Skype's patents.

No, that's what standard bodies are for. No need for stupid patent licenses.

Besides, this is exactly why this isn't free.

Could I make a format based on Opus, but not conforming to the spec? Maybe because I had an idea for better algorithms in some parts? No. I cannot take the parts of Opus which fall under Skype/Microsofts patents and use them in derivatives. This means that both the implementation as well as the standard are free and open on paper only. In reality, I am denied freedom number 3 - the right to distribute modified implementations.

Take note that you could just solve this with a trademark on Opus (which probably already exists). Many large FLOSS projects do that. Firefox, for example - derivatives are not allowed to call themselves "Firefox" (which I think is one of the very few valid uses of trademarks).

If Skype/Microsoft would be actually interested in a free and open standard, they would have pledged to let go of these patents. I don't know if you can just say "this patent is now invalid", but if not, they could hand them over to the standard body, which could then assure that everybody is allowed to use these patents until they expire.

>Personally I think that's fine. If you want to engage in a full-on patent war, you should not benefit from a patent license like this.

I find it quite funny that people already implictly assume that if someone starts a patent infringement lawsuit, they are in for patent war. Please tell me again why we haven't got rid of patents yet?

Re: Firefox Beta 15 supports the new Opus audio format

#73

Post by cageface »

taligent wrote: post #37
ajasmin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potentially yes. But Microsoft and Apple not supporting VP8 & WebM probably has more to do with these companies being part of MPEG LA (a firm which sell licenses for H.264 related patents).

It has nothing to do with that. And everything to do with VP8/WebM being a proprietary, non standard at the time that the world consolidated on H.264. That and the fact that H.264 had hardware support when the iPods and Zunes were taking off.

You keep using this word "proprietary". I don't think it means what you think it means.

How is a codec I can download in complete source form and use in any way I like without licensing anything or answering to anybody "proprietary"?

The fact that we live in a world full of patent trolls that will sue you for tying your shoelaces doesn't make every codebase without explicit corporate patent indemnity "proprietary".

Re: Firefox Beta 15 supports the new Opus audio format

#74

Post by cageface »

makmanalp wrote: post #33
polshaw wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My somewhat educated take on that is that 'perceptually lossless' refers to quality at which the source cannot be reliably picked from the source/encode in any sort of test that would pass as scientific, possibly outside of a few very rare edge cases (sound samples, not people). This happens at lower bitrates than many people might imagine, IIRC v2 lame (~192kbps) has not been reliably identified, nor vorbis v6 (~160…

So if I'm getting this correctly, a computer test (not a person) has to look at two clips of audio and tell which is the source and which is encoded? I'm surprised that 192k is actually indistinguishable. I thought some humans could tell the difference there.

No a computer can trivially tell the difference.

But most people can't distinguish a properly encoded mp3 from the original at 192kbits and often much lower than that.

Re: Firefox Beta 15 supports the new Opus audio format

#75

Post by cageface »

te_chris wrote: post #17
simonster wrote: post #2

Those listening test results are impressive. I wonder how it performs at higher bitrates.

It said in the article that it was "percptually lossless" or similar. I'm very, very intrigued.

Lossy audio compression over about 160kbits is a boring subject these days because for the vast majority of users and samples it's more than good enough.

I'd imagine this would have to be at least competitive with mp3/aac/ogg at those rates.

Re: Firefox Beta 15 supports the new Opus audio format

#76

Post by 4ad »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #72
4ad wrote: post #66

Great, when are they going to support FLAC instead of these formats nobody will ever use?

It may not be provided by the browser, but it is possible: http://labs.official.fm/codecs/flac/

I'm curious how that works. It decodes the FLAC in JavaScript, but it still has to expose it in some format understood by the browser. To my limited knowledge there's no lossless encoding scheme supported by browsers, not even WAV PCM.

/edit: spoken too soon WAV PCM is supported by WebKit, Gecko and Presto: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_Audio#.3CAudio.3E_element

Re: Firefox Beta 15 supports the new Opus audio format

#77

Post by gcp »

marquis wrote: post #25
te_chris wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It said in the article that it was "percptually lossless" or similar. I'm very, very intrigued.

There are examples here which worked out-of-the-box for me in Chrome: http://www.octasic.com/en/tech/opus_audio_codec.php In my listening opinion with very good isolated headphones: the music is very good but you can hear the drop-off of the highs in the vocal examples. It's good but not good enough for 'professional' use at the lower bitrates.

It's good but not good enough for 'professional' use at the lower bitrates.

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

Re: Firefox Beta 15 supports the new Opus audio format

#78

Post by taligent »

cageface wrote: post #73
taligent wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with that. And everything to do with VP8/WebM being a proprietary, non standard at the time that the world consolidated on H.264. That and the fact that H.264 had hardware support when the iPods and Zunes were taking off.

You keep using this word "proprietary". I don't think it means what you think it means. How is a codec I can download in complete source form and use in any way I like without licensing anything or answering to anybody "proprietary"? The fact that we live in a world full of patent trolls that will sue you for tying your shoelaces doesn't make every codebase without explicit corporate patent indemnity "proprietary".

Proprietary: "something that is used, produced, or marketed under exclusive legal right of the inventor or maker."

The WebM trademarks and copyright are owned by Google.

Yes you have a license to use WebM as it is today. But Google can make the next version closed source and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it. And of course companies are going to use Google's 'official' WebM regardless if it is open or closed source leaving you screwed.

Re: Firefox Beta 15 supports the new Opus audio format

#79

Post by gcp »

mtgx wrote: post #48
wmf wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has a big NIH conflict of interest since they bought GIPS. "On the audio side, we will initially support iSAC, iLBC, G.711, and DTMF, with iSAC being the default. It is a royalty free wideband codec optimized for speech, open sourced at webrtc.org." http://blog.chromium.org/2012/04/chromes-webrtc-roadmap.html It looks like somebody volunteered to add Opus to Chrome and was met with silence: https://groups.goog…

So which is better, iSAC or Opus?

Skype used the SILK part of Opus to replace iSAC quite a while ago. (SILK is in fact their second iteration of their own codec to improve upon/replace it)

I couldn't find any direct comparison, it looks like the IETF standardization work didn't even consider it worthwhile comparing to iSAC as it was judged outdated and "being phased out". (For example, Google participated in the tests, but they only tested against iLBC, not iSAC)

So it's likely that Opus is way better. It can certainly scale to much higher quality than iSAC can just by the format alone.

Qualitywise, Opus outperforms the state-of-the-art high-latency codec at music encoding while being a low latency music & speech codec itself. The only case where another codec outperforms Opus anywhere seems to be AMR, when encoding speech at very low bitrates (You can read the summary here: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-codec-results-01

Re: Firefox Beta 15 supports the new Opus audio format

#80

Post by gcp »

SiVal wrote: post #34

Where is Google in all this? They must surely be aware of all such IETF projects. I can understand why Apple wasn't mentioned (Apple Island is a world unto itself to the maximum extent possible), but Google has usually pursued the opposite strategy. This seems like the sort of thing they would get behind unless there is some issue I'm unaware of, and it seems as though Mozilla would mention Google in this infomercial…

Google apparently participated in the listening tests and concluded Opus outperformed the GIPS codecs they had just bought for 68 million USD, sometimes by wide margins.

I guess they're still hurting over that? :)

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