Chromium To Get Support For MP3 (browsernative.com) 54
An anonymous reader shares a post: Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome, Opera and several other browsers, is going to support MP3. This would enable users and websites to play MP3 files in Chromium browser. A Chromium contributor informed about this, "We have approval from legal to go ahead and move MP3 into non-proprietary codecs list." The MP3 support in Chromium is targeted for version 62.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Wine just announced it fixed the last compatiblity issues and Notepad is now a Platinum-certified app.
Notepad was rated as "Platinum" as of Wine 1.1.36. https://appdb.winehq.org/objec... [winehq.org]
Wine 1.1.36 released on January 8th of 2010. https://source.winehq.org/git/... [winehq.org]
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Wine just announced it fixed the last compatiblity issues and Notepad is now a Platinum-certified app.
Well that's up to the WINE project... if the problem is patents, all you can do is wait. Besides there's nothing wrong with a high bit rate MP3, except that it's maybe a MB or two bigger than an equivalent AAC. If it lacked quality it would be different.
Re:In other exciting news... (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides there's nothing wrong with a high bit rate MP3, except that it's maybe a MB or two bigger than an equivalent AAC.
When you're paying $5 to $10 per GB for satellite or cellular Internet access, "a MB or two" begins to add up over the course of a triple digit hours per month of streaming.
Re:In other exciting news... (Score:4)
MP3 certainly isn't a modern, top-tier format. But there's an awful lot of legacy mp3 data out there, so it's good to be able to take advantage of that in a free and open browser.
One nice thing about patents, I suppose, is that we do have time on our side. With the volume of tech that's being patented, the low-hanging fruit has largely been snapped up (for example, I believe Amazon's One-Click patent expires very soon), and in another few decades, most of the formats we now use (like MP4 video) will also be free and clear. It won't be the latest and greatest, but at some point, we're going to run into some hard limits about how far we can compress video as well. Eventually, it won't be worth patenting new formats that can compress video 2% more than the previous well-established format, and ALL formats will be patent free. Eventually.
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Every modern browser indicates which tabs are playing sounds by putting a little speaker icon on the tab, and I think they also all allow you to mute them by clicking the same speaker icon.
So no, finding out which tab is making noise is no longer an issue.
They're also smart enough that if the tab stops playing sound (e.g., paused), the speaker icon disappears, so only tabs act
Re: In other exciting news... (Score:2)
We didn't have tabs back in IE4.
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If you care about bandwidth that much just use Opus.
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there's nothing wrong with a high bit rate MP3, except that it's maybe a MB or two bigger than an equivalent AAC. If it lacked quality it would be different.
It lacks quality. Even on regular gear with my bad 39 years old ears I can ABX 320kbit MP3 on specific samples, trained people can do so on typical (rather than specifically chosen) MP3s.
On the other hand, 128kbit Opus is fully transparent in quiet rooms on expensive gear, while 96kbit is enough for regular listening conditions. OGG and AAC are somewhat worse, but not drastically so.
There's no reason to use MP3 unless you suffer from ancient software you can't update.
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It lacks quality. Even on regular gear with my bad 39 years old ears I can ABX 320kbit MP3 on specific samples, trained people can do so on typical (rather than specifically chosen) MP3s.
I find that very hard to believe. Which encoder settings did you use? Did you do proper double-blind ABX tests?
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Last I tried, I was able to reliably ABX 128 kbps Opus vs. lossless (sourced from CD rip of a single track) nine times in a row with a decent pair of studio headphones. That being said, it's really hard to tell the difference in normal usage. Opus is quite a versatile codec. I hope to see hardware codec support in consumer devices.
I haven't yet investigated how well Opus handles inter-sample peaks, though MP3 is somewhat infamous for failing in this area vs. AAC.
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ThIs WoUlD eNaBlE uSeRs AnD wEbSiTeS tO pLaY mP3 FiLeS iN cHrOmIuM bRoWsEr.
Are MP3 still commonly used? (Score:1)
The MP3 format seemed to slowly go away with the move to streaming services.
Re:Are MP3 still commonly used? (Score:4, Informative)
Amazon still sells MP3 files. This means when you click "Buy this album for offline listening" or "Buy this album for use after your subscription expires", and you're not using an Apple service, you get a phonorecord in MP3 format.
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IE6 and no player at all (Score:3)
the default should be to use whatever your OS offers up as the default viewer for some MIME type.
So always use the operating system's pack-in browser? For several years, "the default viewer for some MIME type" on the majority of newly purchased PCs for values of "some MIME type" equal to "text/html" was Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. If relying on operating system components known to be deficient were a good practice, we'd be using NetCaptor or other wrappers for Trident and its successor EdgeHTML instead of Firefox and Chrome.
And on stock macOS, Ogg isn't among the containers, and Vorbis isn't among t
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Adobe, Adobe, Adobe (and a little Apple) :)
The move to play stuff natively comes from the role that Flash once played and our collective horrified reaction. We did the "let the OS handle it" and we got Quicktime. We did the "let the browser load plugins" and we got Flash and the horrifying Acrobat plugins, and some more Quicktime.
Compared to that hot mess, the vulnerabilities allowed by the javascript PDF rendering code have been fairly mild.
What miracle... (Score:2)
Danke... (Score:1)
...Frau Hofer, that was very schweet of you.
OMG OMG OMG!!! (Score:2)
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But when can we expect Realmedia support? (Score:5, Funny)
I've got some old postage-stamp sized videos to watch, dammit!
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they were postage stamped size on a 800x600 crt, imagine how good they will look on a 4k screen!
Wasn't MP3 working already? (Score:2)
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Open source audio beats mp3 (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be nice to see Ogg/Opus (and even it's predicessor Vorbis) be as widely used as proprietary codecs. Is the world so commercialized that this kind of thinking is impossible though?
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Yes. It's a conflict of interest problem.
Google is perfectly fine with Ogg - that's why Chrome plays it.
Apple and Microsoft, though, are both in the AAC patent holder's club. They also both have their own proprietary formats which have a role in their long-term business plans (though, in MS case, that's more wishful thinking that they can get WMA back into fashion). Why would they support an open-source competitor to something they profit from?
The result of this mess is that HTML5 audio and video tags all n