Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jprjr_ 490 days ago
The thing I'm excited about is decoding chained Ogg FLAC files.

Some software wouldn't work correctly with FLAC-based Icecast streams if they used libFLAC/libFLAC++ for demuxing and decoding. Usually these streams mux into Ogg and send updated metadata by closing out the previous Ogg bitstream and starting a new one. If you were using libFLAC to demux and decode - when the stream updated, it would just hang forever. Apps would have to do their own Ogg demuxing and reset the decoder between streams.

Chained Ogg FLAC allows having lossless internet radio streams with rich, in-band metadata instead of relying on out-of-band methods. So you could have in-band album art, artist info, links - anything you can cram into a Vorbis comment block.
2 comments
BoingBoomTschak 490 days ago
Massive waste to use FLAC for Internet streaming, though. Opus was made for this purpose (in part).
link
nullc 488 days ago
HTTP streaming is pretty much inherently high latency, or at least none of the software stack is particularly agreeable. I don't think it's fair to say that Opus was made for that purpose in any way that any other general purpose audio codec wasn't. (or even... vorbis really was made for that purpose, though sure you're better off using opus for it).

Lossless audio is unconditionally transparent-- you won't have coding artifacts, you won't have issues with the codec accidentally increasing the crest factor of the audio and creating clipping where there wasn't. If you have the bandwidth for it, why not?

So many people are using streaming in lieu of radio-- a true broadcast medium. I think any high ground to argue efficiency was lost at that point. :) making the streams use 10x the bandwidth? meh. Maybe convincing video sites to provide an option to turn off the video would be a better use of complaint energy: it impacts more people than lossless streaming and wastes a lot more bandwidth :)

link
nullify88 490 days ago
Are there any public lossless radio streams out there?
link
longitudinal93 490 days ago
You can filter by "flac" on radio-browser:

https://www.radio-browser.info/search?page=1&order=clickcoun...

link