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by wmf 5078 days ago
Google has a big NIH conflict of interest since they bought GIPS. "On the audio side, we will initially support iSAC, iLBC, G.711, and DTMF, with iSAC being the default. It is a royalty free wideband codec optimized for speech, open sourced at webrtc.org." http://blog.chromium.org/2012/04/chromes-webrtc-roadmap.html It looks like somebody volunteered to add Opus to Chrome and was met with silence: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/discuss-w...

Mozilla says "Audio codecs planned: G.711 & Opus. (Although royalty/license-free, we have no plans to support iLBC, iSAC and G.722)", so as it stands Firefox and Chrome could only interop with G.711 (aka uncompressed). https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Features/WebRTC

2 comments

Very interesting. That Google Group you link to is very busy with responses to almost all threads, but the one you link to, the May 9 offer to add Opus to Chrome, was met by the sound of crickets.

If IE, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome support it, there might be enough leverage on Apple to add it to Safari (Mac, iOS, maybe iPod), too. But without Chrome, Apple has the political cover to claim that "nobody uses it," so they can kill it.

So which is better, iSAC or Opus?
Skype used the SILK part of Opus to replace iSAC quite a while ago. (SILK is in fact their second iteration of their own codec to improve upon/replace it)

I couldn't find any direct comparison, it looks like the IETF standardization work didn't even consider it worthwhile comparing to iSAC as it was judged outdated and "being phased out". (For example, Google participated in the tests, but they only tested against iLBC, not iSAC)

So it's likely that Opus is way better. It can certainly scale to much higher quality than iSAC can just by the format alone.

Qualitywise, Opus outperforms the state-of-the-art high-latency codec at music encoding while being a low latency music & speech codec itself. The only case where another codec outperforms Opus anywhere seems to be AMR, when encoding speech at very low bitrates (<= 6-12kbps). But AMR also has higher delay.

You can read the summary here: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-codec-results-01

Opus, A lot better, it is a rather strange beast that it nearly manage to outperform in every category. With a bit more tuning work for a year or two it could properly be on the same level with AAC @ 256Kbps.
Do you have samples where AAC@256kbps outperforms Opus@256kbps? That'd be very interesting...