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Flac is lossless, it's full quality.

Opus, except at _extremely_ low bitrates, has similar or better quality than the most commonly used modern codecs:
http://opus-codec.org/comparis...

Flac is fast to encode and decode. Opus decodes slower than MP3 but on par with AAC LC, and encodes slightly faster than AAC LC and on par with MP3. Performance will vary a bit by encoder:
http://fmedia.firmdev.com/audi...

Do you have any evidence AV1 is not royalty-free? These go-nowhere arguments are pointless.

VP8 and VP9 are royalty-free. Baseline JPEG is royalty-free. PNG is royalty-free. Opus is royalty-free. AV1 will be royalty-free as well.

Unless you've got something concrete to prove that AV1 can't be royalty-free, there's nothing more to say.

Opus has been touted as a more efficient codec than the aging MP3 codec.

Nothing "touted" about it -- it is better than MP3.

Opus does have an unusual limitation, however: It has a limited selection of input sample rates, and 44.1KHz is not one of them. So anything recorded at 44.1KHz has to be up-sampled to 48KHz before it can be encoded in Opus.

Now, training is a little trickier because I cannot share the data.

I cannot share the current data I'm using because it's copyrighted. Hence asking for people for help getting data that I can redistribute.

So weâ(TM)re supposed to just give jmv a bunch of data with no way to know how he is using it?

Yes, because I have such a track record for keeping things private.

Yes, like Vorbis which was and is used in many video games. Like Opus which is the world's best lossy audio codec and used by services such as Skype and YouTube. Like VP9 which is used by YouTube and supported by Firefox, Chrome, and Microsoft Edge. Always bet on royalty-free.

If they actually want to support open codecs

Microsoft supports Opus because they have IP in it via their purchase of Skype. And Microsoft has joined the Alliance for Open Media to participate in the development of the video codec to follow VP9, which will be built from the best features of Thor, Daala, VP10 and whatever anyone else brings to the table.

I hate the ongoing assumption that "media" just mean "internet TV".

Anyway, this appears to be specifically about developing a legally-free video codec. Anyone who's skeptical that it can be done should be pointed to the previous similar project to develop an audio codec: opus, which has been done, successfully, for a couple of years now and was developed in a similar fashion by a similar coalition of companies (and driven largely by Xiph/Mozilla's work as looks like this video codec will probably be, with input from other relevant tech). Opus is extremely successful technically (I don't think there is any other general-purpose lossy audio codec - free or proprietary - that opus doesn't handily beat), and has been moderately successful in the market (uptake by forward-looking developers was fast, Google supports it, Cisco supports it, and even friggin' MICROSOFT has committed to it now...)

My only complaint about opus so far is that Google's webm-only video fixation keeps them from remembering to support .opus audio files often. Android "Lollipop" and later has native opus codec support but still doesn't recognize .opus files as media. (VLC for Android does, though...) Chrome had a long delay in getting opus audio enabled for the same reason. Jerks. (Chrome does support .opus now, though, and has for a while).

If work on the video codec goes anywhere near as well for this coalition as it did for Opus audio, it ought to be very successful. Maybe more so, given that much of this coalition was also involved with opus and perhaps have learned some useful lessons on how to run projects like this.

(Admittedly, that's still an "if", but I'm actually optimistic here.)

They're working on Thor through the IETF Internet Video Codec working group and committing to royalty-free licensing for those patents. It will be difficult for Cisco to walk back from that. Many codecs make use of patents which are licensed under royalty-free terms. Baseline JPEG does, Opus does, VP8 and VP9 do.

Where is Opus support? It's a royalty-free, open standard, and one of the best performing codecs available, especially when it comes to low bitrate streaming. It's also already supported by two major browser vendors. Of course you can't lock people into your platform with it... but that shouldn't matter, right?

This is why it's important to have royalty-free codecs for the web that everyone is free to implement. You can choose to do your own implementation of a given codec and take direct responsibility for the security of the implementation, or ship your preferred choice of third-party implementation directly integrated with your product without any patent licensing hassle. I just hope Opus audio and NetVC video become ubiquitous sooner rather than later.

Daala is shaping up to be excellent as well, but its biggest competition may be VPx in the long run

It may be less competition and more coopetition. The NetVC working group has started in the IETF. Daala has been submitted to the standardization process. Maybe VP10 will be as well and maybe the result is ideas from both become the final version of NetVC, similarly to how the Opus audio codec is a combination of CELT from Xiph and SILK from Skype and standardized as IETF RFC 6726

Yes, browsers have indeed become so complicated. It's not just Mozilla, Google's putting even more resources on Chrome than what Mozilla can afford. A browser is now essentially an operating system (see FirefoxOS) that can do pretty much everything *and* needs to do it in a way that's secure against untrusted code (JS). On top of that, Mozilla is involved in projects that reach beyond just the web, like the Opus audio codec and the Daala video codec that I'm personally involved in (there's many more of course).

Opus codec support is "Mandatory to Implement" for the WebRTC standard. If this also brings in support for .opus in <audio> (as Firefox, Chrome, and I think most of the "little" browser projects like Opera, Konqueror, etc already have) that would be a great side-benefit.

There is a new codec Opus which outperforms Apple AAC http://listening-test.coresv.n... http://listening-test.coresv.n... http://www.opus-codec.org/

Not to mention, of course, that all the COOL kids are switching to opus anyway...

You are forgetting Daala is developed at the IETF and Mozilla by some of the same people that made the patent free Opus audio codec.

Which really is 'best of breed':

http://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/

So have I have at least some fait.

Agreed here - and I hate it. Thankfully, there are workarounds far less expensive than replacing the car stereo.

I actually LIKE when I'm in a vehicle with a cassette player, because those cassette adapters seem to work quite well. Short range FM transmitters are okay as a last resort, too.

" it would cost hundreds of dollars more per year for a dumbphone user to switch to a phone that plays MP3s."

True, but only if you assume that your choice is "smartphone or nothing". You can get a kick-butt media player that you can stick Rockbox onto for $50 or less if you shop around, and end up with something as versatile as any high-end audio player or smartphone. (Heck, the current builds of Rockbox even have Opus support.)

Failing that, Android-based phones, at least, can actually be used for everything but phone calls even without any voice or data plan. I've found even ancient Android phones make decent mapping and media-playing devices. Pick up a discarded one from a friend or Ebay cheaply and away you go.

For the parent post: "Radio" is that thing that you can sometimes use to pick up news and weather reports while in the car when your data connection on your phone isn't working, assuming you can find news or weather between the frequency bands being used to push a handful of entertainment-media audio products.

Support for .opus files in HTML5 <audio> tags has been in chrome for a few versions now (finally - Firefox has had it for about a year now), but they've kept it disabled by default (and you've had to manually enable "playback of opus in video[sic]" in the switches to use it).

Have they enabled that by default yet, or do we have to continue waiting for the glacial pace of webm-with-vp9-and-opus support to work its way through for them to allow it by default?

From the q&a afterward, it is mentioned that average vp9 quality is within 1% of h.265, but it didn't sound like h.265 was anywhere near ready to roll out, with the only available option being a horrifically slow reference encoder. As for speed, they claim it is about 40% slower than vp8, which is twice as fast as h.264. As such, vp9 should handily outperform h.264 in software.

The open source and royalty free vp9/opus combination sounds like an very compelling option for the html5 video tag, and may become a de facto standard before h.265 is widely deployed. Hardware support for vp9 is also in the works, so if the codec lives up to the claims, there no longer appears to be any good reason to put up with the MPEG LA.

I'm assuming that the speed is speed of encoding rather than playback? This isn't something that many people are particularly worried about.

As your information is all taken from Google please take it with a huge pinch of salt. Google are bound to present a rosy view of VP9 in comparison with h265 given their investment in it.

Personally I'm not keen on this. I don't care if its royalty free and unencumbered by patents. I don't want a single entity in control of a standard and regardless of the open nature of this Google are still in control. If this were Apple* or releasing a patent free codec to the world would you be so welcoming?

* Don't be dismissive of this Apple/NeXT do have a decent record of open source software releases.

From a technical point of view it's basically h265's peer. That's partially because it's largely based on the same tech as h265, in the same way VP8 was largely similar to h264. And is speculated that it has the same licensing issues that VP8 had, for most of the same reasons.

And the speed issue is entirely due to an almost complete lack of hardware support. And while h265 already has announced and demonstrated support, I am not aware of any VP9 support so far.

And doing VP9 decode in software has order-of-magnitude higher requirements than VP8. If YouTube serves up a VP9 video to your phone, you'll wish for the good old days of Flash video.

From the q&a afterward, it is mentioned that average vp9 quality is within 1% of h.265, but it didn't sound like h.265 was anywhere near ready to roll out, with the only available option being a horrifically slow reference encoder. As for speed, they claim it is about 40% slower than vp8, which is twice as fast as h.264. As such, vp9 should handily outperform h.264 in software.

The open source and royalty free vp9/opus combination sounds like an very compelling option for the html5 video tag, and may become a de facto standard before h.265 is widely deployed. Hardware support for vp9 is also in the works, so if the codec lives up to the claims, there no longer appears to be any good reason to put up with the MPEG LA.

I don't know where you got that idea, or why you got modded 'informative', when the whole point of Opus is to have one codec that covers the whole range from low-band speech to full-band music, as can be seen from their handy chart.

You fucking troll.

Have you not heard of Opus? It's a fucking sweetass new codec that beats speex quality-wise for voice compression at equal bitrates, but works equally well for web-radio beating AAC-HE v1 and v2, is better than MP3/AAC/OGG at regular video soundtrack rates (eg 96kbps) and does High-Def lossy audio better than AC3 (192kbps to 448kbps).
It's a fucking amazing codec, and it's already out in beta. VLC and Foobar2000 already plays it. It already has support in FFMPEG and MPlayer.

Have you been that awsome in the the last ten years? NO YOU HAVE NOT.

Go home you stupid child.

Last time I looked, you could enable playback of opus audio by starting chrom(e|ium) with a special command-line switch, but they were refusing to enable it by default until there was opus-in-webm support (a format that as far as I know still doesn't even exist).

Meanwhile, Firefox has played .opus for about a year now...

Right, so they'll call it WebM 2 or whatever.

The point is, when people say "let's hope that WebM can compete with H.265", they probably mean "let's hope VP9 can compete with H.265", while when they say "WebM could barely compete with H.264", they mean "VP8 could barely compete with H.264".

(BTW, the audio codec for next-gen WebM will probably be Opus, which by all accounts is excellent.)

Bruce, Microsoft contributed the SILK codec used in Skype to the Opus project and released any related patents royalty free. I would have a hard time trusting MS if they told me the sky was blue, but they basically made the low bitrate capability of Opus legally doable.

As for those who are posting their scepticism about the opus codec's quality, the IETF standardised Opus as RFC 6716 and is making it a mandatory to implement codec for WebRTC based on it's proven performance at every applicable bitrate.

For quality comparison info:
http://opus-codec.org/comparison/

RFC 6716:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716

Yes, this is really cool. Opus really is the best of all and it's royalty free and had an open source implementation. Yes, it was partly done by Skype and the people from http://xiph.org/ thus it is BSD-licensed.

What more could you want ?

Comparisons:

http://opus-codec.org/comparison/

Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaAD71h9gDU#t=28m0s

Is that the IETF WebRTC draft mandates the Opus audio codec for all clients..
http://www.opus-codec.org/

From:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rtcweb-audio-01
3. Codec Requirements

      To ensure a baseline level of interoperability between WebRTC
      clients, a minimum set of required codecs are specified below. While
      this section specifies the codecs that will be mandated for all
      WebRTC client implementations, it leaves the question of supporting
      additional codecs to the will of the implementer.

      WebRTC clients are REQUIRED to implement the following audio codecs.

      o Opus [RFC6716], with any ptime value up to 120 ms

Actually at 64kbps beats the Apple HE-AAC encoder, aka AAC+.

http://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/

"Shine" is a really funny word for what HE-AAC sounds like at 16-24kbps. You can't polish a turd.

As far as AMR-WB/NB, you have to get down to 8kbps before AMR-WB sounds measurably better, and you have to get down to 6kbps before AMR-NB sounds better. Opus is tied with AMR-WB at 12kbps and better at 16kbps, and it's tied with AMR-NB at 8kbps and significantly better at 12 or above. Look at the studies linked from the comparison page if you want more details, keeping in mind that the Opus encoder has continued to improve in the year since those studies were done.

See the "listening tests" part of our comparison page. These are all tests that were performed by other folks, independently from us.

It's a trap! A prenup and a restraining order have more teeth.

The memory improvements are nice and all, but the support for the Opus audio codec will have a much bigger impact on the Web. Opus is open source, royalty-free, and superior to previous formats in latency, flexibility, and audio quality. It handles speech, music, and general audio well, and scales fluidly from a 6kbps mono narrowband VOIP bandwidth all the way up to perceptually-transparent multichannel music. It's been approved as an IETF standard and should be published as an RFC this week.

Finally having a best-of-breed standardized codec which is universally implementable without patent royalties means that HTML5 audio - especially real-time communications - can finally take off.

Firefox is the second major end-user application to add support. (The first was the foobar2k audio player.)

Perhaps it will be directly implemented in Skype or something.

Skype will use Opus in future. Opus is a low latency codec suitable for both speech and music coding built from the combination of the SILK and CELT codecs. Opus outperforms AAC (and maybe it outperforms Fraunhofer's AAC-ELD codec as well). I imagine Skype's use of Opus will be dependent on Microsoft deciding to stick with that plan. However, as Microsoft has been discovering recently that codecs which require royalty payments can be difficult to manage, I suppose they'll stick with the plan to use Opus as it's royalty-free.

Well, I don't know who thought it was a good idea to duplicate info like IP and port, but I've been using SIP for my own phone service for years, and G.711 works fine, so there's actually no need to use G.729. I'm sure there are some people on 56k or something where it actually makes a difference, but for your average broadband user, G.711 is fine. There's also Codec 2, Opus, which had outstanding performance on what looks like a pretty rigorous listening test, and of course, Speex, but uptake is an issue for those, of course, since both ends have to support the codec.

and a really good VoiP codec

Speaking of, I wonder how this would affect the Opus codec effort... It is a merge of Skype's SILK and Xiph.org's CELT codecs.

I'm afraid it would be shut down real quick. Contributing patents and code to open source projects is not exactly Microsoft's modus operandi.