xiph.org presented the standard for their fancy new audio codec Opus yesterday. Seems like it has a beastly quality/compression ratio, and the numbers look pretty impressive. I'll run a few tests with it when I have a bit time, but I've read about a mp3:opus=9:4 ratio in size while maintaining the same (or even better) quality. They're working on porting it to video as well. Oh, and Firefox 15 seems to support it natively.
http://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/
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A gray world of dread
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Austin, Texas
That is pretty cool! I hope it doesn't end up like OGG; where it is technically quite nice, but finds little use outside of enthusiast or technical communities, and has little to no hardware support.
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A gray world of dread
Well, this time, mighty Microsoft is involved (they're going to use it for Skype), so there might be a decent chance that it'll make it. Dunno if HTML5 supports it yet. That'd be big.
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Nomad's Land
this is exiting news. and the audio quality at low bitrates is rather jaw dropping. i'll be using this for my next lo-bit release. thanks for posting µB, i probably would've missed this otherwise.
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Sydney, NSW
wow, this is pretty damn exciting! This'll make it easier to share things across the net without compressing it to all hell (which drags on my low bandwidth speed like you would never believe).
thanks for sharing, ub!
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uhajdafdfdfa
time to transcode all my MP3 collection for better quality files
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Telerophon wrote:
That is pretty cool! I hope it doesn't end up like OGG; where it is technically quite nice, but finds little use outside of enthusiast or technical communities, and has little to no hardware support.
OGG (and CELT for that matter) are used in tons of games, it saves having to pay license fees for other codecs.
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uhajdafdfdfa
my mp3 player supports ogg fwiw (and flac!) and it was a really cheap sansa one
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Sweden
I wonder how it performs for chip music specifically. Square waves is a pretty special case that mp3 simply doesn't handle very well.
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Nomad's Land
µB wrote:
Dunno if HTML5 supports it yet. That'd be big.
Yes it does. According to my research, Opus should work in the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. Also VLC started supporting it in version 2.0.4.
And Rockbox is going to support it, meaning it will be available on a wide range of upcoming portable devices.
I'll upload a little HTML5 test page in the coming days.
Last edited by irrlichtproject (Sep 13, 2012 1:10 am)
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Westfield, NJ
ant1 wrote:
I LOL'd.
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Westfield, NJ
I'm pretty sure there's an HTML5 <audio> tag on this page:
http://www.opus-codec.org/examples/
HTML5 does not provide support for specific audio codecs. The HTML5 Audio module just provides an audio wrapper that can serve audio content. It's up to the browser makers to determine which audio codec formats they will actually support.
This means that it really doesn't matter if HTML5 supports it or not, it's a moot point.
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Westfield, NJ
p.s. this page is excellent:
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uhajdafdfdfa
latest version of firefox (which i have, sadly) already supports it i believe
and latest version of foobar (which i don't have) as well
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A gray world of dread
boomlinde wrote:
I wonder how it performs for chip music specifically. Square waves is a pretty special case that mp3 simply doesn't handle very well.
Yeah, that'll be interesting. I suspect it to be a problem of the FFT algorithm though, so I don't know. Maybe there's some magic special code for squares in it. I think I'll pit against my previous low rate test, that example should be still around. I'm not on my own computer atm, so I'll have to do that later.
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Nomad's Land
so, a first quick test:
Reference WAV, 48000 Hz Resolution, 440 Hz tone
OPUS, 64 kbps VBR, recorded via internal mixer (sorry, was too lazy to adjust the volume)
I'd say even at 64 kbps it looks pretty good, though it isn't perfect. But there's a ton of settings available with the encoder, I'll be checking those out later.