FLAC [LWN.net]

FLAC

Posted Aug 8, 2008 18:02 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
Parent article: Firefox to support Theora video

No one is talking about FLAC. While Vorbis is good, a lossless audio format would be nice too.

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FLAC

Posted Aug 14, 2008 13:58 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

Actually, what I'd like to have is a "correction stream" format. I.e. you have a lossy format, and delta side-streams which give you more quality, up to lossless. You need a real-time protocol to make sure that the lossy format passes, and the optional side-stream is dropped when the bandwidth is not sufficient.

This should work with video as well, where the side-streams can be even larger, e.g. a youtube-size/quality main stream, and up to HD quality from the various side-streams. Even to-the-air broadcasts could avoid the "digital" effect of digital TV broadcasting when they interleave these streams in such a way that a noisy signal only kills the high quality stream, and the low quality one is encoded in the most reliable bits.

FLAC

Posted Aug 19, 2008 17:59 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

This would be a very useful feature. Not just to achieve lossless, but to scale the quality to
the available bandwidth so a server can serve more clients but at the cost of lower quality
when necessary. Some products such as Windows Media does this already but that's the kind of
plugins this whole thing is designed to avoid.

Vorbis does this, almost

Posted Aug 28, 2008 8:48 UTC (Thu) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link]

As far as I rememer Ogg Vorbis streams can drop quality simply by dropping bits from the stream.

So it should be entirely possible to create a high-bandwidth Vorbis stream and dynamically drop quality in the web server for each client as it streams.