5 ms·

On a related note, I wish more (any!) podcasts were distributed in opus.

iagooar 8y ago
All the +2k podcasts hosted on Podigee (a podcast hosting company mainly known in German-speaking countries) are distributed in opus. But it is, and probably will always be, a rather niche distribution format. AAC had its moment, but MP3 is alive and kicking. Even Apple acknowledges its importance by adding support for chapter markers in iOS12.
- zdw 8y ago
  There are a lot of playback issues - VBR MP3 and older OS releases of both iOS and Android, never mind the car players and similar all contribute to the problem. The post-show of this podcast talks about these and other issues in detail - Marco is on both sides of the issue as a podcast producer and podcast app developer: http://atp.fm/episodes/182 http://atp.fm/episodes/182
  - CharlesW 8y ago
    If you're a podcaster, another benefit of AAC over MP3 is that VBR is not an issue.
- CharlesW 8y ago
  > AAC had its moment… That moment is 15 years in with no signs of losing steam[1]. AAC effectively replaced MP3 for most online audio use cases, with podcasting as a notable exception[2]. And of course, AAC is the audio format for all basically all online video distribution. [1] Apple kicked off the transition in 2003 with the introduction of AAC-based digital music sales. [2] Because podcasting is a decentralized medium, and the vast majority of podcasters don't know much (if anything) about media encoding.
  - chungy 8y ago
    Perceptions are probably influenced heavily by your own usage and places for consumption. I'm also in the camp of "AAC is very rare, if at all"... Considering also that YouTube uses WebM, which very explicitly is only Vorbis or Opus for audio, "basically all online video distribution" must exclude the web's most popular video distribution site...
    - CharlesW 8y ago
      Every YouTube video has had AAC audio from the very beginning. Same goes for every Vimeo video, every Netflix video, every Hulu video, etc. Streaming audio services like Pandora use AAC too. That's because AAC is the only format you can count on to work on all devices, and to be hardware decoded on all devices where battery life matters.
geofft 8y ago
As far as I know, enough podcast apps require MP3 (and not even VBR!) that you have to use MP3, and you can't have multiple <enclosure>s, so how would you do this? A separate RSS feed for Opus, linked only on the website and not submitted to aggregators?
- CharlesW 8y ago
  > As far as I know, enough podcast apps require MP3 (and not even VBR!) that you have to use MP3… Nope! Podcast episodes can be encoded using AAC (which is as ubiquitous as MP3) without issue. That won't realistically possible with Opus until Opus hardware decoding has available in mobile devices for 5-10 years.
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    Or more like never unless you get Apple to front it...
  - Hello71 8y ago
    I highly doubt there are any devices that are capable of accessing the modern web, with all its JavaScript bloat, yet cannot decode a simple audio codec. Even when Apple was installing AAC hardware decoders, they were already almost obsolete by modern embedded CPU development (especially the rise of medium-power ARM SoCs). I highly doubt any devices released in the past 5 years have any sort of fixed-function audio decoder. Maybe an encoder, possibly some general-purpose DSPs, but not a format-specific decoder.
    - andai 8y ago
      I use Opus on my phone all the time. I was in a place where internet was really expensive, so I'd download and convert things on a Linux server. In conjunction with youtube-dl I could listen to pretty much anything I wanted, using almost no data. These days I use it mostly for audiobooks, if storage is limited.
      - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago

All the +2k podcasts hosted on Podigee (a podcast hosting company mainly known in German-speaking countries) are distributed in opus. But it is, and probably will always be, a rather niche distribution format. AAC had its moment, but MP3 is alive and kicking. Even Apple acknowledges its importance by adding support for chapter markers in iOS12.

zdw 8y ago
There are a lot of playback issues - VBR MP3 and older OS releases of both iOS and Android, never mind the car players and similar all contribute to the problem. The post-show of this podcast talks about these and other issues in detail - Marco is on both sides of the issue as a podcast producer and podcast app developer: http://atp.fm/episodes/182 http://atp.fm/episodes/182
- CharlesW 8y ago
  If you're a podcaster, another benefit of AAC over MP3 is that VBR is not an issue.
CharlesW 8y ago
> AAC had its moment… That moment is 15 years in with no signs of losing steam[1]. AAC effectively replaced MP3 for most online audio use cases, with podcasting as a notable exception[2]. And of course, AAC is the audio format for all basically all online video distribution. [1] Apple kicked off the transition in 2003 with the introduction of AAC-based digital music sales. [2] Because podcasting is a decentralized medium, and the vast majority of podcasters don't know much (if anything) about media encoding.
- chungy 8y ago
  Perceptions are probably influenced heavily by your own usage and places for consumption. I'm also in the camp of "AAC is very rare, if at all"... Considering also that YouTube uses WebM, which very explicitly is only Vorbis or Opus for audio, "basically all online video distribution" must exclude the web's most popular video distribution site...
  - CharlesW 8y ago
    Every YouTube video has had AAC audio from the very beginning. Same goes for every Vimeo video, every Netflix video, every Hulu video, etc. Streaming audio services like Pandora use AAC too. That's because AAC is the only format you can count on to work on all devices, and to be hardware decoded on all devices where battery life matters.

geofft 8y ago

As far as I know, enough podcast apps require MP3 (and not even VBR!) that you have to use MP3, and you can't have multiple <enclosure>s, so how would you do this? A separate RSS feed for Opus, linked only on the website and not submitted to aggregators?

CharlesW 8y ago
> As far as I know, enough podcast apps require MP3 (and not even VBR!) that you have to use MP3… Nope! Podcast episodes can be encoded using AAC (which is as ubiquitous as MP3) without issue. That won't realistically possible with Opus until Opus hardware decoding has available in mobile devices for 5-10 years.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  Or more like never unless you get Apple to front it...
- Hello71 8y ago
  I highly doubt there are any devices that are capable of accessing the modern web, with all its JavaScript bloat, yet cannot decode a simple audio codec. Even when Apple was installing AAC hardware decoders, they were already almost obsolete by modern embedded CPU development (especially the rise of medium-power ARM SoCs). I highly doubt any devices released in the past 5 years have any sort of fixed-function audio decoder. Maybe an encoder, possibly some general-purpose DSPs, but not a format-specific decoder.
  - andai 8y ago
    I use Opus on my phone all the time. I was in a place where internet was really expensive, so I'd download and convert things on a Linux server. In conjunction with youtube-dl I could listen to pretty much anything I wanted, using almost no data. These days I use it mostly for audiobooks, if storage is limited.
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago