QUOTE (goodnews @ Apr 25 2006, 01:09)
I look forward to this ALS lossless international standard. That way software (should) work interoperably and we should have a standard lossless file format that all hardware and software (including PC, Mac and Linux) can agree on and whose files shouldn't become obsolete in the future. It is unfortunate that it contains patented routines. We shall see if Adobe Audition, Nero, Easy Media Creator, iTunes, Easy CD-DAE, RealPlayer and others start supporting this ALS lossless MPEG 4 audio standard. Now if Microsoft and Apple embraced this in their respective media players (WMP 11/10 and Quicktime 7), boy would this thing take off.
Agreed. Lossless audio is becoming more reasonable in filesize these days, to the point that I would be happy to use it on a more regular basis. My point of interest is muxing it into MP4. I do NLE on short videos, so keeping a lossless H.264 + ALS master is really appealing, especially when you consider how efficient these standards are. I was very impressed with the reference software, it would be great to see someone pick it up as a project and tweak it, maybe even improve the efficiency a bit.
QUOTE (Garf @ Apr 27 2006, 12:55)
I have become completely disinterested in this format now that it is clear they will not properly support the MP4 container but instead prefer to promote spreading of raw ALS files, which undoubtely will lead to a mess such as ALS+ID3V2 or ALS+APE2 or whatever, completely voiding any purpose of existance this format ever might have had.
I would strongly suggest everyone to stay away from ALS and instead use a format such as Wavpack of FLAC.
I appreciate your concerns, in a way it's similar to how I feel about H.264 in AVI
But lets look on the positive side, before shooting it down altogether. They may well promote spreading of .ALS files, but it's the end user that will have the most impact in the end. What we need is a working Directshow decoder, and for ALS support to be added in GPAC's MP4box (and parsing in Haali's splitter), and you are already part way there.
Why do I say that it's the end user that has the most impact? Well look back to encoding a few years ago. People were storing MPEG-4 SP in AVI (via DivX 3.11 etc); at that time AVI was familliar to them, and MP3 was good enough. There wasn't enough incentive (or tools available, this is the important part) to use MP4 for instance. People got used to encoding with DivX and storing in AVI. As DivX progressed and they introduced B-frames, they obviously didn't want to jump ship to MP4 because they would huge amounts of people, and lose custom. Naturally the solution was to hack B-frames into AVI to keep the end user happy.
If you look around now, you will even find hardware MPEG-4 ASP players that support ASP in AVI, and some of these do not even mention MP4! How crazy is that? The standard container is not even supported!
Now we have H.264. The information about the required hacks for B-frames in AVI/VfW has become more widely known (among encoders), and H.264 in AVI is generally accepted as a bad thing™, so encoders now are using MKV or MP4. When people (we encode fanubs) question the switch from ASP in AVI to H.264 in MP4/MKV, we give them a basic understanding of what happens or why it is bad, sure this doesn't matter to most people, but they also get the benefit of Vorbis or AAC as opposed to MP3, maybe chapters too. Sometimes we may even tell them a little white lie, you have to be cruel to be kind
. The basic notion is that we learned from our mistakes and we want to do things "properly" now, and even this may help have an effect on the industry. As I'm sure you know, Nero's MP4/H.264/AAC abilities have also helped spread the "word" a good deal.
AFAIK, itunes wraps it's AAC encodes in MP4 and just changes the extension a bit, as a result MP4 files are being spread.
In short, since no one else is promoting ALS in MP4, we can do it ourselves providing the tools and support is there. Word soon gets around.
An encoder already exists (no matter how unoptimised it may or may not be), all that's needed now is a directshow decoder (something that would eventually be available in FFDShow would be awesome), parser (maybe Haali might be interested once muxing exists with MP4box), and of course the muxing to MP4 itself. It is an inconvienience that they do not have direct MP4 output, but it's not the end of the world having to mux it; or if someone did pick up an ALS project, maybe direct MP4 output could be incorporated there.
QUOTE (Garf @ Apr 27 2006, 14:03)
I can only see that:
1) Despite promises months ago, there is no further information about MP4 embedding, no example/reference files and no support in the software itself. It might be possible to theorethically determine how it should be done from the standard, but realistically I don't want to do this without any reference to check my implementation against. And I'm sure that anyone else considering support will have the same problem.
2) They apparently considered making a Winamp plugin (supporting only .ALS and only supporting a subset of the possible encoding modes) a higher priority.
Now, people will want to tag those .ALS files for use with Winamp, and god knows what happens next. One would think they would have learned from the experience with MP3...
With regards to your first point, I assume that from this, that MPEG-4 ALS will be stored in the same or similar way to AAC when it comes to containing it in MP4 (though this really is an assumption, so don't take it too seriously). As you can see, it's an amendment to 14496-3 (which covers muxing of audio I believe).
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailP...5&ICS2=40&ICS3=As for the second point. I really don't know what they was thinking making a Winamp plugin first, a Directshow decoder would have been so much more useful.
It's strongly advised to read Garf's comment (post 14) in this thread before you decide to use it to convert all your music into this loosless format.