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Microsoft Edge To Support Dolby Audio
jones_supa writes: Microsoft has revealed that its new Edge web browser will come with support for Dolby Audio in order to offer high-class audio when visiting websites. "It allows websites to match the compelling visuals of H.264 video with equally compelling multi-channel audio. It works well with AVC/H.264 video and also with our previously announced HLS and MPEG DASH Type 1 streaming features, which both support integrated playback of an HLS or DASH manifest," Microsoft explains in a blog post. Windows 10 will also ship with a Dolby Digital Plus codec.
I'm not that big on streaming unless it's my girlfriend's Netflix which I don't even pay for, so I didn't even know sound quality was an issue that had to be addressed in browsers.
All glory to Arstotzka!
Regardless, this is a surprisingly good browser. I think Microsoft has finally taken the feedback to heart. Now they just need to drag IE out behind the woodshed and put it out of its misery.
I have been suffering browsing the web with only one audio channel per ear for literally decades.
What to them so long, this is embarrassing. When I go to the movies I get to smell expensive popcorn and experience 6 to 16 channels of high-def audio. Why not on my windows smart phone and my tablet?
Now I will be able to listen to obnoxious ads in glorious Dolby. Not really - I don't use MS's trash, and I have AdBlock in my browser anyway.
So their web browser finally caught up to their media player from the '90s? Good job, Microsoft!
Embedded MIDIs in 5.1 without the need for plugins!!!
yes, that's exactly what I need: trillala from my loudspeakers when I watch a website.
Just great.
If I want music - I connect a dac and a real amplifier to it.
get lost mikrosoft
Exactly what we don't need.
This is only Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD support would have been much, much better and would have helped Dolby which has been losing the high end to DTS HD Master Audio.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
When I read the headline, I assumed this meant that when you play your cassette tapes from a tape player hooked up to your computer through Edge, that you won't hear quite as much hissing noise due to Dolby Audio.
To everyone who had no idea what a cassette tape was, I'm just showing my age.
This has nothing to do with a web server at all, only the encoding of the content. And the entire point to supporting it within the browser is to make an extension unnecessary.
You haven't really heard the Hamster Dance until you've heard it in Dolby
-Glires
Dolby means zip in the age of AAC et al. In the 80's dolby was a useful compander for your cassette tapes. Anyone could make a compander, but there had to be a standard. Dolby did the research, came out with a good one, and there ya go. Way better than no compander because of the physics of writing audio to magnetic media. In the 90s when the world had moved onto CDs and no compander was needed, They kept the name alive by introducing multi-channel stereo and big base to movie theaters. Again it was a standard and backed by research so it worked great. The shaking big base sound was novel too. So we got all the disaster movies, like who can forget Towering Inferno?
But we've been in the digital age since the 2000s and there's just nothing left for them to add. There's all sorts of formats for pristine audio (PONO) or streamed audio or 1000 songs in your pocket (AAC). these days your headphones matter more than the avialability of a good sound storage algorithm.
Dolby is just a name that people of a certain age will buy because if it's reputation from the days of Cassettes.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
IF you want the full integrated experience, you got to stay with one vendor.... You know how this game is played, at least until the EU forces you to unbundle...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
This is potentially good for Netflix since Windows users have been limited to stereo from Netflix for some time now since Netflix uses Silverlight.
Microsoft will no doubt partner with Monster Cable to come up with a new IP Layer for transporting web pages with perfect fidelity, much the way that Monster Cable CAT-5 provides perfect Ethernet.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Still no Vorbis support. Or WebM.
Strange. It almost looks like Microsoft is only supporting technologies that require patents they own.
For the HLS support that Microsoft is talking about, yes. Their DASH works out of the box, but their HLS support is going to require you transcode the HLS stream via IIS. There is an alternative option provided by a third party plugin that adds HLS support to Microsoft's Player Framework for "universal" (windows) apps, however it is not supported by Microsoft and won't have support for this new Dolby Digital Plus feature. This all may change in the near future, but that's what I understand is the case at the moment.
Like we need a overhead channels on the web maybe for movies but 4K + good 8-64 channel sound will kill your data cap.
Not too long after Windows 8 launched with the AC-3 and E-AC-3 codecs, Internet Explorer has had the capability to decode these audio formats. It recognizes the FourCC codes in the ISO Base Media File Format container as well as the MIME tags.
Part of the problem, however, is the perceived shift in both audio loudness and the perceived location of speech. All AC-3 and E-AC-3 content, when properly measured, should play dialog back at -31dB relative to full digital scale. Unfortunately, this makes the codec inherently quieter unless the decoder is set to something called RF mode, which boosts the loudness to -20dB and compresses the audio more heavily. Such control for loudness is not typically found in HTML5-based apps, though the W3C has a committee working on this issue. The loudness can be a particular problem on the Windows 8 tablet devices out there, as many programs in AAC format come pre-normalized to somewhere around -23dB to -24dB relative to full scale. Unless all content is pre-normalized to the same consistent playback level - which AAC ads will definitely not be, and probably not AAC stereo content - there will be an inconsistency of experience.
All of this also presupposes that you have either a proper surround virtualizer or a discrete 5.1 speaker system such as is found in a properly set up home theater. Considering that less than a third of homes have any kind of surround sound in them, and given the loudness issues, I'm not certain what the benefits will be here. But it gets even worse, as dialog in multichannel AC-3 and E-AC-3 is steered to the center channel in most programs, whereas in stereo content it is mixed into left and right without regard to position. This can result in disturbance to the listener. Furthermore, any channel configuration changes to an audio-video receiver will typically cause muting when switching modes between stereo output and multichannel output, potentially interrupting the experience for the listener.
Part of this is the add-on nature of AC-3 and E-AC-3 to Windows and an inherent failure to integrate stereo AAC and HE AAC playback behavior with that of stereo and multichannel AC-3 and E-AC-3. Until then, this will be more of a curiosity than anything substantially improving the consumer's experience, and developers should take note if they believe that HTML5/CSS/Javascript development of their apps can really unify their experience across devices yet.
I forgot to mention that if you use the tag in their Edge browser, the HLS and DASH will both be supported. The IIS transcoding or Player Framework third party plugin for HLS are only for non-web app development.
I'll take that over the bulk of Google's services which either only work in Chrome or Google pretends to only work well in Chrome when they spam me with the "Modern Browser" download button.
Does this mean that Netflix will (finally) be surround sound through the browser?
Each click in panoramic 3D HD Audio Surround Sound! I can hardly wait
is a free elf...
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?
Dolby does a lot of good research. That you throw them aside as a relic of the past, while at the same time discrediting them for some of the formats you praise (AAC is a thing in part due in part to Dolby's participation in creating the standard) simply shows that you have a myopic and illogical view of the world.
Kid-proof tablet..
Opus has replaced for Vorbis for all use cases AFAIK, since it is better at low bit rates and equal at high bit rates.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
All of this also presupposes that you have either a proper surround virtualizer or a discrete 5.1 speaker system such as is found in a properly set up home theater. Considering that less than a third of homes have any kind of surround sound in them, and given the loudness issues, I'm not certain what the benefits will be here. But it gets even worse, as dialog in multichannel AC-3 and E-AC-3 is steered to the center channel in most programs, whereas in stereo content it is mixed into left and right without regard to position. This can result in disturbance to the listener.
I'm deaf in one ear, you insensitive clod!
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I would pay actual money for a browser that had *no* sound capability.
Or even just one that I could reliably disable sound on.
Why even bother trying to boast about High Quality playback (other than marketing)? Almost any audio and video on the web is compressed anyway and having "Dolby Audio" isn't going to make this significant difference. Even if you did load lossless audio and video, why would I do it in a web browser?
Thank Dolby Labs for no-hiss DACs, noise-cancelling headphone cans, ADC floor filters, echo and feedback cancellation, cellular handsfree...
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Man, that Thomas Dolby guy is such a genius. Science!
They did a lot of good research, but you don't do heavy metal in Dobly.
For the amount of time you put into this post you sure as hell are utterly ignorant.
It seems that young folk these days use YouTube, and other video sites, a lot to listen to music videos. So probably Microsoft just want another brand to use on its marketing war.
But I don't see how this will actually matter without support from other browsers. Who will waste CPU time and storage to create a stream that only one minor browser can take advantage of?
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
It's called Edge? Wasn't it Spartan before? Next week it will be called???? Slashdot poll please!
I wish I had mod points today so I could give you +1 Informative.
I already have a media player, thanks, and the web browser is not it.
How many streaming music and video services does your preferred media player support? And how can a new streaming music or video service arrange to be supported in your preferred media player? Finally, how should a browser-based video game play its music and sound effects? Or is the concept of a "browser-based video game" itself abhorrent to you?
Dolby has moved far beyond the original analog companding system. Digital Dolby systems are used for the sound in the majority of movie theaters, most DVD and Blu-Ray discs, all digital television broadcasting in the US, and both Amazon and Netflix can send Dolby Digital sound with their streams so you can have surround sound. On a computer that generally means pass-through to a digital output that you can connect to your receiver: at first it was usually a separate stream via S/PDIF or Toslink, now it's usually part of the HDMI signal along with the video.