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Breakthroughs In HTML Audio Via Manipulation With JavaScript
jamienk writes "Imagine if you could grab and manipulate audio with JavaScript just like you can images with Canvas. Firefox experimental builds let you do just that: crazy audio visualizations, a graphic equalizer, even text-to-speech, all in JavaScript! Work in progress; you need a special build of Firefox (videos available), being worked on via W3C."
The game and all the movements were Javascript. The sounds were done with flash.
Not really. Vorbis has about the same quality per bit as AAC (unlike theora vs h264), and it's established long enough to not have patent issues. There's no reason not to implement support for Vorbis, and it's plenty good enough to be the default codec. What's more, Youtube's behind Vorbis (it's part of the WebM spec), and since Flash has pledged support for WebM, they'll have it too.
Vorbis has been used by a number of major game publishers for game audio, precisely because it has no license fees. I think WoW would be a big enough target for the patent trolls, how about you?
> However, mp3 is not free...yet. Some of these patents are set to expire on their 20 year time frame in a couple of years it would seem.
Yes, the next MP3 patent expires this Sunday. The longest patent seems to expire in 2018 but that appears to be MPEG-2 LSF and only required for low sample rate MP3s. So the next furthest date looks like April 2017 but it may be worth double checking the dates on those around 2014/2015.
http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=MP3_Patents
Example case - trailers from trailers.apple.com - the ones hosted at apple typically demand that you have Quicktime installed (obviously since Quicktime is their technology). Quicktime might be dandy on the Mac but is most definitely god awful on the PC - much worse than Flash, in fact I'd put it in the same category as Adobe Reader or Real Player plugins.
.mp3 link in Firefox, the Quicktime plugin fires up and starts playing it - and its player sucks. Also, since it's impossible to install iTunes without Quicktime, every time I install or upgrade iTunes I have to go through and decrap-ify all the mime associations for Quicktime.
Further more, Quicktime's browser plugin assigns itself as the default player for many types of media - including mp3 files. So every time I click on an
Yes I will be happy when Quicktime dies.
Third, unlike Theora and H.264, Vorbis is actually much better than MP3.
For fuck's sake, when will people understand that the listings on w3schools.com ARE ONLY FOR THAT SITE AND NOT REPRESENTATIVE OF THE GLOBAL MARKET SHARE?!
There is no Flash involved here, you read wrong. I wonder why you got modded up.
Vorbis has smaller file sizes for the same quality or better quality for the same file size (q1 (~80kbps) is easily comparable to 128kbps MP3).
Vorbis also supports up to 255 channels with official channel ordering specs up to 8 channels (7.1), while MP3 only supports mono and stereo.
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