- From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:33:42 -0400
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 12:08 PM, Dr. Markus Walther<walther at svox.com> wrote: > Ian Hickson wrote: >> On Tue, 30 Jun 2009, Matthew Gregan wrote: >>> Is there any reason why PCM in a Wave container has been removed from >>> HTML 5 as a baseline for <audio>? >> >> Having removed everything else in these sections, I figured there wasn't >> that much value in requiring PCM-in-Wave support. However, I will continue >> to work with browser vendors directly and try to get a common codec at >> least for audio, even if that is just PCM-in-Wave. > > Please, please do so - I was shocked to read that PCM-in-Wave as the > minimal 'consensus' container for audio is under threat of removal, too. > > Frankly, I don't understand why audio was drawn into this. Is there any > patent issue with PCM-in-Wave? If not, then IMHO the decision should be > orthogonal to video. PCM in wav is useless for many applications: you're not going to do streaming music with it, for example. It would work fine for sound effects... but it still is more code to support, a lot more code in some cases depending on how the application is layered even though PCM wav itself is pretty simple. And what exactly does PCM wav mean? float samples? 24 bit integers? 16bit? 8bit? ulaw? big-endian? 2 channel? 8 channel? Is a correct duration header mandatory? All of this and more would need to be specified if interoperability is to be assured, and all the combinations would require test cases, etc. It's probably of compatible complexity for existing solutions to support FLAC, since its a little more clearly defined than "PCM WAV", and it has the benefit of being half the bitrate of PCM wav. Not that I don't believe that having PCM wav support of some kind would be *good*, but it's not a silver bullet and in order to support many applications something other than lossless audio must be supported as well. 1.5mbit/sec just isn't a reasonable rate for musical uses across public networks. It would be misleading to name a 'partial baseline'. If the document can't manage make a complete workable recommendation, why make one at all? A couple people here have suggested that Vorbis is less controversial than Theora. Has any of the named parties gone on record on that point?
Received on Tuesday, 30 June 2009 09:33:42 UTC