AOMedia Announces Royalty-Free IAMF Audio Container Specification

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AOMedia Announces Royalty-Free IAMF Audio Container Specification

Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is known for their work on the AV1 video codec and AVIF image file format while now they have released their first royalty-free audio specification...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AOMedia-IAMF-Audio-Spec

[rhadlee]

Great - another container format for media files. Makes me wonder why all the existing ones aren’t good enough.

[Mathias]

Thanks AOM. But why?

[mb_q]

Seems like an attempt to standardise 3D sound around certain D-branded stuff... Sadly, when patents are involved, nothing is stupid :L

[Anux]

Great - another container format for media files. Makes me wonder why all the existing ones aren’t good enough.

I don't get it either, as if there weren't enough existing formats that are free. They could have extended ogg or mkv.

[Quackdoc]

Great - another container format for media files. Makes me wonder why all the existing ones aren’t good enough.

This is for 3d audio like ambisoncs, dolby atmos and DTS;X. There currently is no open sound format that is suitable for this. this is designed to be as flexible as possible while still allowing good flexibility (IE using aac or opus or flac). Im not entirely sure, but I don't think this is quite as good as object based audio according to https://aomediacodec.github.io/iamf/...esentation-obu

However as long as it allows arbitrary speaker positions, that should be good enough. Having arbitrary speaker positioning is genuinely one of the most underrated things in a very high end sound setup. It's quite honestly amazing to listen to.

[Danny3]

Well, Fuck you AOMedia!
You could've used MK!
You could've extended / improved MKV if it was not fully suitable
But no, let's invent another crap and waste every video player / media center time to support yet another container format.
Get lost with this crap!
In the meantime, MKV with FLAC, DTS, AC-3, AAC, Opus works great!

[Duve]

This is for 3d audio like ambisoncs, dolby atmos and DTS;X. There currently is no open sound format that is suitable for this. this is designed to be as flexible as possible while still allowing good flexibility (IE using aac or opus or flac). Im not entirely sure, but I don't think this is quite as good as object based audio according to https://aomediacodec.github.io/iamf/...esentation-obu

However as long as it allows arbitrary speaker positions, that should be good enough. Having arbitrary speaker positioning is genuinely one of the most underrated things in a very high end sound setup. It's quite honestly amazing to listen to.

It is interesting that they have gone in this direction, but given how thick the competition is in that space I can see the need for it. Their is nothing right now that would given any open format a leverage with the established players at the moment, might as well roll their own format.
I wonder if this can be applied to Vorbis or the OGG format?

That said, I wonder how sonos looks at this given their spat with Google.

[Quackdoc]

Well, Fuck you AOMedia!
You could've used MK!
You could've extended / improved MKV if it was not fully suitable
But no, let's invent another crap and waste every video player / media center time to support yet another container format.
Get lost with this crap!
In the meantime, MKV with FLAC, DTS, AC-3, AAC, Opus works great!

There are some real misconceptions here. This could partially be my mistake, I wasn't clear, this defines a couple of things, the IA Sequence, the standalone IAMF encpasulation, and the encapsulation of the IA sequence inside of ISO-BMFF containers, better known as mp4 based containers..

why use ISO-BMFF, because it's the standard. Avif, Heif, etc.

It is interesting that they have gone in this direction, but given how thick the competition is in that space I can see the need for it. Their is nothing right now that would given any open format a leverage with the established players at the moment, might as well roll their own format.
I wonder if this can be applied to Vorbis or the OGG format?

That said, I wonder how sonos looks at this given their spat with Google.

Vorbis maybe but it's not within the spec, OGG no. Matroska it could possibly be contained in an mkv.

[Old Grouch]

It would be interesting to understand why Matroska wasn't suitable, and why extending Matroska to be suitable wasn't the approach taken.

There is some missing backstory here.