4 ms·
As someone who grew up with mp3s, your example seems interesting because it seems like an example where you had to encode from something obscure (ogg) to the cl
by atonse 3y ago
As someone who grew up with mp3s, your example seems interesting because it seems like an example where you had to encode from something obscure (ogg) to the closest thing to a “universal” sound format as wav could be: MP3.
In that case doesn’t it seem like Google took an ideological stance by choosing a non-patent-encumbered codec instead of supporting mp3? And they could do it because of their dominance? Or is that not accurate?
- seba_dos1 3y agoVorbis was ubiquitous on the Web way before Google had such influence over it as it has today, and MP3 was absolutely nowhere near universal. Firefox did not support MP3 for a while, and even once it did it relied on system codecs - and many distros didn't ship with MP3 support by default until its patents expired a few years ago. Choosing non-patent-encumbered codecs for open standards is as much ideological as practical.
- jonhohle 3y agoI’ve never seen Vorbis and ubiquitous in the same sentence. Besides Mozilla, who had Vorbis native support in their browser? In practice, MP3 has had support on every platform since the mid 90s. I could probably count the number of times I’ve come across an ogg file being distributed on one hand.
- seba_dos1 3y ago> Besides Mozilla, who had Vorbis native support in their browser? Pretty much everyone who implemented HTML5 audio for a few years, while MP3 support in the browser was initially barely heard of? Mozilla, Google, Opera, KHTML, WebKit... Safari and IE were the only outliers, and had tiny minority of market share for a while (not counting versions that didn't support HTML5 audio at all). Today only mobile Safari is still an outlier. You couldn't use MP3 without Vorbis fallback on the Web for about a decade. Whenever you played audio in the browser without using Flash on anything else than iPhone, chances that it was Vorbis were very high for a good while. YouTube used it in WebM before switching to Opus. In fact, even AAC gained reasonable support on the Web earlier than MP3 did. In practice, although very popular, MP3 was nowhere near universally supported until just a few years ago. I know that pretty well - I have posted patches to some projects that enabled MP3 support once its patents expired myself; I've also used to maintain websites based on HTML5 audio since 2009.
- account42 3y agoI had a portable "MP3" player that natively supported Vorbis long before HTML5 was a thing.
- pjmlp 3y agoIn what alternative universe?
- dwaite 3y agoNon-patent-encumbered and standard are not the same thing at all. Platforms do not want to ship support for esoteric formats, and will fight back against adding anything not needed for long-term interoperability - for examples, see JPEG XL drama lately in Chrome. This is for maintainability/security surface reasons as well as patent risks, as open/closed and standardized/bespoke axes have nothing to do with whether or not something is patent encumbered.