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Firefox 51 To Support FLAC Audio Codec

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  • #31
    Originally posted by bug77 View Post
    That's an oxymoron right there.
    How can something be "widely used" within 1% of the total market? Same argument I hear when people on Phoronix decry lack of support for feature X on Linux, totally forgetting Linux on the desktop is at (or around) 1% as well.
    I'll ignore that you pulled numbers out of your backside to focus a bit on the fact that what matters is relative market.

    If you go with total market share then you can drop also addons and pretty much any other feature because the average user is dumb as a bag of bricks and can barely operate the browser to go to Facebook and read his email.

    If you wonder why this isn't happening it is because the power users are a minority but have a strong power on pushing adoption of a browser from the dumb masses (as they usually push those around them to use it because it can do X or Y better or at all, or simply because theu are the one that maintains the PC used by the dumb user and so on)

    Therefore yes, in the less-than-10% of users that choose firefox because of its features the amount of people that want this feature may be relevant.

    It is more complex than just looking at total numbers and without access to some of their telemetry data it's hard to say if they did a good choice or not.

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    • #32
      There may be some websites specializing on streaming flac music, but most won't do it. They don't even use the most popular format, mp3 in multimedia streams, because it's too big, and bandwidth is money. Flac has no chance against aac and the likes when it comes to bandwidth usage, and the higher quality only matters for a few people. Just remember that the generic folk uses youtube to listen to (usually) very bad quality music videos on a daily basis.

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      • #33
        Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
        I'll ignore that you pulled numbers out of your backside to focus a bit on the fact that what matters is relative market.

        If you go with total market share then you can drop also addons and pretty much any other feature because the average user is dumb as a bag of bricks and can barely operate the browser to go to Facebook and read his email.

        If you wonder why this isn't happening it is because the power users are a minority but have a strong power on pushing adoption of a browser from the dumb masses (as they usually push those around them to use it because it can do X or Y better or at all, or simply because theu are the one that maintains the PC used by the dumb user and so on)

        Therefore yes, in the less-than-10% of users that choose firefox because of its features the amount of people that want this feature may be relevant.

        It is more complex than just looking at total numbers and without access to some of their telemetry data it's hard to say if they did a good choice or not.
        Oh, having support more more codecs is definitely better than not having it. I was just replying to the guy wondering why FLAC didn't happen earlier.
        and the 1% argument was directed at the guy that said "widely used among audiophiles". Audiophiles are next to nothing within the audience that consumes music today. I mean, even some of those considering themselves audiophiles, they just mean they got a home theater system at home.

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        • #34
          Originally posted by ssokolow View Post

          Bandcamp, Loudr.fm, Humble Bundles, and others I'm currently forgetting about will give you FLAC.
          LOL, yeah the idiots at bandcamp just re-encode the mp3 files as FLAC and sell it that way thinking no one will notice. Piracy is more reliable as hilarious as that sounds.

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          • #35
            Originally posted by stqn View Post
            FLAC support is useless, nobody is going to stream that as it’s a huge waste of bandwidth, but at least it’s not a step in the wrong direction like almost everything else they do.
            Actually, one of my hobby projects is a PIM tool and the Dropbox-like portion of it is slated to use FLAC.js as part of its suite of "preview in browser" backends. I suspect the FLAC support will mainly be for either local applications or situations where you want to allow users to preview things without running your own transcode farm.

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            • #36
              Originally posted by r1348 View Post
              Can anyone point out to an online service that uses FLAC?
              There are music stores which sell FLAC.

              Examples:

              Discover amazing music and directly support the artists who make it.


              Satisfy your appetite for music at Presto Music: the UK's leading e-commerce site for classical & jazz recordings, sheet music, books and musical instruments


              But, there is no point to stream FLAC on-line. Because it only wastes bandwidth. You can achieve audio transparency using lossy codecs like Opus. The value of FLAC is providing the lossless original in case you want to re-encode it into some lossy codec tomorrow.

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              • #37
                Originally posted by stqn View Post
                FLAC support is useless, nobody is going to stream that as it’s a huge waste of bandwidth, but at least it’s not a step in the wrong direction like almost everything else they do.
                Yes, it's useless in the browser. It's far form useless as a general feature, to sell lossless music.

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                • #38
                  Originally posted by c117152 View Post
                  Also, WebP had a rocky start for a bunch of different reasons:

                  1. It was plagued by a chicken-and-egg "***k-you Facebook, I want to download images for local use and share the links with my Edge/Opera-using friends. What's this WebP S**t?" introduction experience.

                  2. It didn't initially support Alpha and Mozilla refused it for Firefox because, given JPEG's ubiquity and the adoption pains for any new format, alpha support is a must for any JPEG successor worth the pain.

                  3. WebP 0.2.1 took WebP 0.2.0 and introduced alpha. WebP 0.3.0 took WebP 0.2.0 and introduced animation. Which version were they supposed to support?

                  4. Even now that the format has become more sane and implementation isn't an exercise in chucklehead-chasing, people like me still hate the name, WebP, because it's dull (Web, WebM, WebP, etc.) and reminds of the impression the initial alpha-less, animation-less WebP gave that Google was trying to replace the entire web stack, just so they could control the standards.

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                  • #39
                    Originally posted by SaucyJack View Post

                    LOL, yeah the idiots at bandcamp just re-encode the mp3 files as FLAC and sell it that way thinking no one will notice.
                    That's not true.

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                    • #40
                      Originally posted by bug77 View Post

                      That's an oxymoron right there.
                      How can something be "widely used" within 1% of the total market? Same argument I hear when people on Phoronix decry lack of support for feature X on Linux, totally forgetting Linux on the desktop is at (or around) 1% as well.
                      Desktop share is never equal to importance or influence, the number of developers who using Linux or alike as developing platform is much much larger. Firefox has almost lost the battle of mobile market, has it not learned something?

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