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Bug 14817 - Support RIFF WAVE PCM as a baseline audio codec
Summary: Support RIFF WAVE PCM as a baseline audio codec
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-11-14 01:16 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-12-07 23:04 UTC (History)
10 users (show)

See Also:


Attachments

Description contributor 2011-11-14 01:16:16 UTC
Specification: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#top
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#top

Comment:
There is no required audio or video codec in the specification. However, I
think that recommending the use of the AU file format to be supported by
<audio> would be a good idea, since none of the vendors have patent issues
with the format.

Posted from: 87.112.173.109
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.106 Safari/535.2
Comment 1 Tab Atkins Jr. 2011-11-14 08:10:43 UTC
Once all the vendors agree on a codec, we'll put it in the spec.  That hasn't happened yet.
Comment 2 Marat Tanalin | tanalin.com 2011-11-14 09:09:40 UTC
(In reply to comment #1)

WebM is currently supported by most of browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Opera + IE with "WebM for IE9" installed), so probably WebM should be default format for video.

Same (except for IE) applies to Ogg Vorbis for audio.
Comment 3 Andrew Faulds 2011-11-14 12:21:33 UTC
The point I (the submitter) was making is that AU (.au/.snd) is a good baseline file format for audio that is well established, and is not difficult to implement.

Although a better-compressed, more feature-rich audio codec might/will eventually be agreed on by browser vendors, I think the AU file format (or perhaps another, similar format such as WAV-wrapped PCM) would provide a baseline format that all browsers could support.
In other words, AU would be to OGG or MP3 as BMP is to PNG. 

The format has been in use for years on all three major platforms (although particularly Linux/Mac), and there are plenty of tools, open-source and otherwise to play back and convert AU format files. Additionally, two browser vendors, Apple and Microsoft, already produce software that plays AU (QuickTime and WMP, respectively), and AU is a de-facto standard for UNIX audio.
Comment 4 Philip Jägenstedt 2011-11-14 12:43:17 UTC
The uncompressed format that several browsers already support is RIFF WAVE PCM.
Comment 5 Andrew Faulds 2011-11-14 12:46:32 UTC
(In reply to comment #4)
> The uncompressed format that several browsers already support is RIFF WAVE PCM.

It seems I overlooked that. It is quite odd that Internet Explorer doesn't support it, considering Windows has always used RIFF WAVE files for raw audio, and Windows has built-in decoders for it.

In that case, I suggest the spec should say browser vendors should support RIFF WAVE PCM as a base minimum.
Comment 6 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-12-07 23:04:00 UTC
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: If you want the spec to require a specific codec, the path is easy: get all the major implementors to implement that codec.

Putting it in the spec does not achieve that end.