FLAC

FLAC

Posted Aug 14, 2008 13:58 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525)
In reply to: FLAC by jezuch
Parent article: Firefox to support Theora video

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.

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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.