4 ms·

Well it's lossless, so you can transcode it without worry. I'm not sure if you can encode it without Quicktime, but decoder support is widely implemented. Appl

by blasdel 17y ago

Well it's lossless, so you can transcode it without worry. I'm not sure if you can encode it without Quicktime, but decoder support is widely implemented. Apple originally developed ALAC for their AirTunes WiFi remote-speaker system. It supports low-latency streaming, and seeking works a lot better than with FLAC in every player I've used. FLAC's pointlessly-special container format suffers from the same screwy metadata problems as the other ogg formats: Apple wanted it in a standard mov/mp4 container.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago
The reverse engineered codec library may be supported in all the usual software players that handle everything, but I've never seen hardware support from anything other than iPods, iPhones or Airport Expresses (all of which I own) and this is apparently because of Apple's refusal to licence it. FLAC is of course widely implemented: http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware I find it surprising that the independently developed FLAC codec would suffer from the same problems as the Ogg container, unless you're talking about the slightly nonstandard FLAC in Ogg approach. But if Apple really re-implemented a lookalike lossless format because they couldn't figure out any other way to put it in a .mov container then I think we're agreed that their engineering priorities around this issue are all messed up.
jrockway 17y ago
FLAC's standard container format is not Ogg. You can put FLAC in an Ogg container, but it's rather uncommon and the FLAC FAQ recommends against it. (Not because it will mess anything up, but rather because it is pointless.) FLAC's container format supports arbitrary seekpoints, but it seems many encoders do not add them. Add them and a seek is a constant-time operation.
- blasdel 17y ago
  FLAC's native container format uses OGG-style metadata: http://wiki.etree.org/index.php?page=FlacMetadata http://wiki.etree.org/index.php?page=FlacMetadata Though I've never seen a FLAC file with any metadata at all in the wild: it's always in the filename and accompanying text files. I would end up massaging the metadata into the standard mp4 fields when I transcoded to ALAC. In practice when I've tried seeking in a FLAC file, I usually get a short pause followed by a loud click, and then the timecode is usually wrong or missing entirely. Maybe none of the files had seekpoint data, or the player/decoder implementations I used didn't support them. ALAC always worked perfectly.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    Yeah, what decoder are you using? XMMS2 seeks in my FLAC files just fine, and I have not gone to any effort to add seekpoints.

by blasdel 17y ago

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

The reverse engineered codec library may be supported in all the usual software players that handle everything, but I've never seen hardware support from anything other than iPods, iPhones or Airport Expresses (all of which I own) and this is apparently because of Apple's refusal to licence it. FLAC is of course widely implemented: http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware I find it surprising that the independently developed FLAC codec would suffer from the same problems as the Ogg container, unless you're talking about the slightly nonstandard FLAC in Ogg approach. But if Apple really re-implemented a lookalike lossless format because they couldn't figure out any other way to put it in a .mov container then I think we're agreed that their engineering priorities around this issue are all messed up.

jrockway 17y ago

FLAC's standard container format is not Ogg. You can put FLAC in an Ogg container, but it's rather uncommon and the FLAC FAQ recommends against it. (Not because it will mess anything up, but rather because it is pointless.) FLAC's container format supports arbitrary seekpoints, but it seems many encoders do not add them. Add them and a seek is a constant-time operation.

blasdel 17y ago
FLAC's native container format uses OGG-style metadata: http://wiki.etree.org/index.php?page=FlacMetadata http://wiki.etree.org/index.php?page=FlacMetadata Though I've never seen a FLAC file with any metadata at all in the wild: it's always in the filename and accompanying text files. I would end up massaging the metadata into the standard mp4 fields when I transcoded to ALAC. In practice when I've tried seeking in a FLAC file, I usually get a short pause followed by a loud click, and then the timecode is usually wrong or missing entirely. Maybe none of the files had seekpoint data, or the player/decoder implementations I used didn't support them. ALAC always worked perfectly.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Yeah, what decoder are you using? XMMS2 seeks in my FLAC files just fine, and I have not gone to any effort to add seekpoints.