Opus advocacy/evangelism Options

[jensend]

Thought I should start a thread for people to post links where people can voice their requests for Opus support.

The one that got me thinking about this is caniuse.com, a well-known site which shows the version history and marketshare of support for various browser features. Nice tool for webmasters etc. It has pages for the <video> tag and particular video codecs (H264,WebM,Theora), but when I went looking to see what it said about <audio> support, I found it had a table for the tag but not for audio codecs, instead linking to 2-3 year old outdated articles about codec support. Then I saw that someone had created a feature request for adding an Opus <audio> support table. That'd help people make informed decisions about using Opus in the browser.

Plenty of other pages out there where people have made Opus support feature requests, and I thought it might be nice to collect them and point people to them. Some of these are longer shots than others, and some organizations are less responsive to such input than others, but you never know.

In the absence of pages that display feature requests and allow people to vote or comment on them, people could simply coordinate about other forms of contact. (e.g. "I just sent suggestions@foo.com an email about Opus support; here's what I said about why it makes sense for them, and if you'd also be interested you could drop them a line too.")

A few requests I'd seen before that were the first to come up in a search were Spotify, Steam, and Windows Phone.

[Gainless]

My asssumption, or better apprehension, is that the manifestation of Opus will pretty much stand or fall with the support of Windows Media Player. If that could be achieved, there should be no reason to not make it universal on mobile audio players, too.

This post has been edited by Gainless: Feb 15 2013, 21:54

[Nick.C]

It needs to be a standard codec inside Android.

[NullC]

My asssumption, or better apprehension, is that the manifestation of Opus will pretty much stand or fall with the support of Windows Media Player. If that could be achieved, there should be no reason to not make it universal on mobile audio players, too.

Support in windows media player is very unlikely in the near future.

[jensend]

Nick.C- yes, Android support will be vital. The best link for that as far as I see is this AOSP issue.

Gainless, while having support built in to WMP would be nice, FLAC and Vorbis have widespread portable hardware support despite being ignored by MS. Despite so much of it being "their own technology" since the Skype acquisition, the sounds MS has been making during the RTCWeb process have not been terribly Opus-friendly. Momentum will have to come from other sources; if Opus and RTCWeb are widely adopted MS may eventually follow.

Media Player does not seem to be among the products for which MS has a real feedback program. (Most of those are listed here.) IE is, but I'm not sure how public that program is (I have some kind of MS login but haven't used it in ages and don't have the password handy, so it'd take me a bit to sign into their site and see) and I doubt that would be an effective channel. It may have been silly of me to include the Windows Phone UserVoice link, as that's probably no more likely to affect MS than sending your feedback to /dev/null. I guess the main reason I included it was that >75 people voted for it; there are other products and programs where if 75 people asked for Opus support it would be likely to reach somebody's ear.

But in any case I'd like to keep this from turning into a "support wishlist" or a debate about the merits or likelihood of having Opus support in different applications; we could have a different thread for that. I wanted this thread to be about actual opportunities to advocate Opus support. In this thread, if you mention something you'd like to see Opus support for, please provide a link, email address, etc where people can advocate such support.

This post has been edited by jensend: Feb 15 2013, 23:07

[NullC]

, the sounds MS has been making during the RTCWeb process have not been terribly Opus-friendly

This is not the case.

[jensend]

I stand corrected. I had thought that the removal of MTI codecs in CU-RTC-WEB and the comments that were made about that issue seemed to indicate trouble, and that's the way things were spun by the press. I wasn't following closely enough to see things that pointed the other way e.g. that non-skype-related MS people supported Opus as MTI in RTCWeb, and in the months since August I guess things have been less fractious than some expected. If MS is showing signs that they'll implement support in IE that's great. Anyways, back to the subject at hand.

[RobertM]

Just want to voice my full support for the Opus codec and this forum seems like the best place to do it. I've been tracking the progress of Opus since I first heard about it in late 2012. The work being done is fantastic and will be a huge benefit to the entire web.

It's also great to see such energy and dedication in tracking down and eradicating bugs in the encoder, as evident from the other threads in this forum. Wish that I had the knowledge to help out, but I'm very much an amateur when it comes to audio expertise. However, if there's ever a point at which the project needs volunteers, I'm sure there are many more lurkers like me ready to jump in and help where needed.

Keep up the good work! Huge thanks to all of the individuals and companies that helped bring the project to this point.

[NullC]

It's also great to see such energy and dedication in tracking down and eradicating bugs in the encoder, as evident from the other threads in this forum. Wish that I had the knowledge to help out, but I'm very much an amateur when it comes to audio expertise. However, if there's ever a point at which the project needs volunteers, I'm sure there are many more lurkers like me ready to jump in and help where needed.

Thanks for your support! Using it and finding 'interesting' results is a way that anyone can help. Good test samples where the codec does worse than other samples are critical to making improvements, and they're hard to find except just by doing a lot of using it.

[Garf]

I stand corrected. I had thought that the removal of MTI codecs in CU-RTC-WEB and the comments that were made about that issue seemed to indicate trouble, and that's the way things were spun by the press. I wasn't following closely enough to see things that pointed the other way e.g. that non-skype-related MS people supported Opus as MTI in RTCWeb, and in the months since August I guess things have been less fractious than some expected. If MS is showing signs that they'll implement support in IE that's great. Anyways, back to the subject at hand.

As far as I know, consensus was already reached in IETF that Opus is MTI for RTCWeb, and IIRC Microsoft voted in favor.

It's possible MS did not add MTI codecs in their own proposal, but nobody is deploying that one, so it's not really relevant.

Opus is getting adopted by things like Mumble and similar, which is good because that was the real target market. It would be nice if it would get more acceptance as a general purpose codec, but that field is very hard to move. I guess asking for support in your favorite app is good; developers tend to listen to features a large number of users request.