
Firefox Beta 15 supports the new Opus audio format - kinetik
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/firefox-beta-15-supports-the-new-opus-audio-format/
======
shmerl
Luckily it's going to be W3C standard, and Apple and MS won't be able to use
their lame excuses to avoid implementing it in their browsers, like they did
for Vorbis, VP8 and etc.

~~~
supercow
Microsoft actually helped with the development of Opus according to the
article. :)

~~~
wmf
I remember when MS participated in MPEG-4 development and then fought MPEG-4
for years.

~~~
taligent
And now getting sued by Google over FRAND patents defined in the H.264
standard.

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SiVal
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 if they were backing it.

~~~
taligent
Also we should point out that Google should NEVER be trusted.

Their disgraceful behaviour in blackmailing Microsoft over H.264 FRAND patents
is of huge concern to anyone who cares about standards. Companies should be
encouraged to get together and define industry standards with fair royalty
rates. When that happens we ALL win. Clearly the ITC/EU agree.

Hopefully Google will see the error of its ways and change course.

~~~
necubi
Seriously? Google has owned Motorola Mobility for fewer than two months[0].
And in any case, though it seldom matters to people insistent on seeing the
Android manufacturers in a bad light, Microsoft started this war by demanding
licensing fees for ridiculous patents, like this one, for "Generating meeting
requests and group scheduling from a mobile device"[1].

If you want to talk about bad guys in this mess, it's the companies who ended
the détente by suing their competitors. That would be Microsoft and Apple.
Asking companies like Motorola, HTC and Samsung to tie their hands behind
their backs while Apple and Microsoft shake them down (or try to ban their
products) is lunacy.

We need patent sanity in this country. But in the mean time, companies who are
attacked have every right to defend themselves by any legal means they have
available.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Mobility> [1]
[http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6370566.PN.&OS=PN/6370566&RS=PN/6370566)

~~~
taligent
I fail to see how it matters how long Google has owned Motorola. They are the
ones making the decisions.

And this isn't just about Motorola and Microsoft. This is about the principle
of ALL contributors to a standard licensing their patents in a fair way.
Regardless of whether they are being sued or not or how 'nice' the counter
party is.

Do you not understand that if Motorola gets away with this then it will set in
a place a precedent for all H.264 patent holders to go after any licensees ?
You may not understand the implication but the ITC/EU clearly do.

~~~
jamesaguilar
Google did not own Motorola Mobility when the FRAND stuff went down (in
February). If you can't see how that's relevant then I guess you probably
can't see much at all.

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tobylane
I went into the article thinking why isn't OGG good enough, and the xkcd joke
about 15 different standards.

I left pleased about this new standard (from an advert, any downsides?) but
need some patent assurances. If Mozilla are happy will everyone be?

~~~
slowpoke
Unfortunately, according to Wikipedia, Skype holds software patents on parts
of the algorithm. Even though they said they'd make them avaiable royalty-
free, this still means it isn't completely free.

~~~
notatoad
in some ways, a perpetual unrestricted license is better than an unpatented
algorithm. The big excuse for not adopting webm was "uncertainty" about the
patent situation. If skype has the patents and is giving free licenses, there
isn't any uncertainty here, you know that microsoft has no basis to ever sue.

~~~
azakai
To some (significant) degree, but you never know that no one else has patents
on a technology. That's exactly what is so messed up with software patents.

~~~
notatoad
On any specific technology, you absolutely can know that no one else has
patents on it. That is the responsibility of the patent office: to grant
_exclusive_ rights to an 'invention'. you cannot be held liable for
infringement of anything you have a license for.

In this case though, Microsoft only has patents on part of the algorithm, so
it is theoretically possible that other parts of the algorithm are covered by
other patents.

~~~
prodigal_erik
It's rare, but I remember reading that USPTO has mistakenly issued conflicting
patents. Legally, any publication is enough to bar others' patents, they're
just not good at finding anything in the software literature, so having your
own patent sort of rubs examiners' noses in it.

~~~
notatoad
But the point is that if the USTPO issues conflicting patents, it is them that
is liable instead of you. If you have a license, you're golden.

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mappu
(2010) Some discussion about CELT / Opus from the author of x264:
<http://pbox.ca/16cbg>

~~~
soperj
Just checking, CELT & Opus are the same thing? Seems like they're saying that
Opus is a merge of CELT & SILK

~~~
skoob
Yes, Opus is basically a merge of CELT and SILK.

SILK is a speech codec developed by Skype whereas CELT is a general purpose
audio codec developed by Xiph.org. Opus can use either of them (to encode
speech or e.g. music, respectively) or it can use both codecs simultaneously
for high-quality speech.

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makmanalp
When they say perceptually lossless, by whose perception do they mean? Some
definition of the average human?

~~~
polshaw
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 (~160kbps). So their claim of 'perceptually
lossless' at 256kbps is neither surprising or impressive. (it may be
competitive/better at those high bitrates and they are just being conservative
with the claims).

~~~
makmanalp
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.

~~~
pgeorgi
Usually it's double blinded ABX testing: A computer program gives you:
Encoding A, encoding B, unknown encoding A or B. You have to choose if X is A,
or X is B.

One of the encodings will be "uncompressed" when testing if the format in
question is perceptually lossless.

Repeat that a couple hundred times with many different listeners using
standardized samples and programs (doom9, an audiophile forum, does such runs
every now and then), and you get a rather good idea on what's going on.

As for the 192kbps: It also depends on the algorithms used. bladeenc or 8Hz-
mp3 back then created 320kbps files where you can easily hear the difference.
Current lame builds at 192kbps? not so much.

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

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

~~~
polshaw
They mention 256kbps in regards to that, at which point all of vorbis, aac and
mp3 (lame) are 'perceptually lossless', so it wouldn't be much new. While it
is hard to tell (because tests at higher bitrates don't really work out/
produce winners), it seems that any sonic advantage held is at the lower
bitrate end.

~~~
nullc
Measuring the point where something becomes perceptually lossless is quite
difficult because, by definition, you're measuring at the bounds of
perceptibility.

In terms of simple objective measures (e.g. the masking weighed SNR,
<http://people.xiph.org/~greg/celt/NMR.v.c.l.png>) Opus does better than
Vorbis (and AAC) at high rates too. Between that and the overall better time
domain performance, my _expectation_ is that Opus can become perceptually
lossless at lower rates, but this is hard to validate.

Getting the lowest possible average perceptual lossless rate is also a product
of the encoder having a good psymodel, and released opus encoders have pretty
much no explicit psymodel at all (but still manage to be competitive). So this
reduces the interest in doing a bunch of very difficulty listening tests to
determine the exact perceptually-lossless points, since they'll likely go down
with near term encoder improvements.

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4ad
Great, when are they going to support FLAC instead of these formats nobody
will ever use?

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
It may not be provided by the browser, but it is possible:

<http://labs.official.fm/codecs/flac/>

~~~
4ad
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>

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haberman
Very exciting if it can deliver on all of its claims, but noticeably absent is
anything whatsoever about the patent status of the format.

~~~
wmf
[https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/search/?option=document_sea...](https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/search/?option=document_search&document_search=draft-
ietf-codec-opus)

~~~
nullc
The IETF datatracker link is pretty useless. Pretty much anyone can make any
claim they want there and there is no way to remove it. Its just a statement
collector, not a review.

Most of the results returned are against old versions of the specification,
too.

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mtgx
So is Mozilla going to use VP8 combined with Opus in Firefox 15, instead of
Vorbis, for "free" videos?

~~~
metajack
Opus is a (usually) lower bitrate codec for very low latency applications. In
other words, a completely different sweet spot than Vorbis, AAC, etc.

~~~
gcp
It outperforms Vorbis and AAC even at their (high-latency) forte, though.

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sp332
I understand they were trying to finalize the spec and weren't worried too
much about the individual encoder decisions, but check out some of the code at
the bottom of this convo, it's scary <http://pbox.ca/16cbg>

~~~
nullc
Thats a conversation from two years ago... But whats scary about it?

~~~
sp332
Specifically, this:

    
    
      p=_u[_k+1];
      s=-(_i>=p);
      _i-=p&s;
      yj=_k;
      p=_u[_k];
      while(p>_i)p=_u[--_k];
      _i-=p;
      yj-=_k;
    

is incomprehensible and basically unmaintainable. The variables are named
badly and the control flow is not obvious.

~~~
nullc
What maintenance are you looking to perform on it?

Thats code from the inner loop of the algebraic codebook decoder. Its
operation is explained by a 117 line long comment in the source, and by a page
long description of a simplified algorithm in the spec. Beyond replacing it
with an alternative implementation which would naturally have nothing in
common there isn't much to maintain in it (and that code itself has been
proven correct through exhaustive testing as well as the partially-exhaustive
unit tests for it included with the codec).

Most of the codec doesn't look like that. Though it's not all easy to read—
e.g. a lot of the signal processing stuff is intermediated by macros so that
it works for both fixed point and floating point. And if you don't like it
then, by all means, write your own. Having more interoperable implementations
would be great. Most formats don't give you a BSD licensed reference
implementation.

::shrugs::

