Why xHE-AAC is being embraced at Meta

Re:Why xHE-AAC is being embraced at Meta by LeoPanthera on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:40PM (#35534747)

As far as I know, xHE-AAC has no advantages over Opus, however, Opus is free from patent licensing.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why xHE-AAC is being embraced at Meta by charcircuit on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @12:17AM (#35534958)

>xHE-AAC has no advantages over Opus

The main features focused on in this article are loudness management and adaptive bitrate audio. From what I can tell Opus supports neither of those things.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why xHE-AAC is being embraced at Meta by Dylan16807 on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @12:31AM (#35535025)

A specific kind of adaptive bitrate where you have pre-encoded "lanes" at different bitrates and you can switch seamlessly at certain points.

I'm not convinced the loudness metadata makes much difference, especially for the entity doing the encoding. Can it do compression at playback time too? That's sort of implied but I'm not sure.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why xHE-AAC is being embraced at Meta by charcircuit on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @12:35AM (#35535050)

> Can it do compression at playback time too

Yes, it has dynamic range control too.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why xHE-AAC is being embraced at Meta by keithwinstein on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @03:06AM (#35535983)

Opus does support adaptive bitrate audio and in basically the same way; with the reference encoder, you can use OPUS_SET_PREDICTION_DISABLED to create a stream access point.

Loudness management isn't really the purview of the decoder/compressed format itself; the article describes using MPEG-D DRC which is, at least in principle, independent of the choice of xHE-AAC vs. Opus. To be clear I have no idea how companies do dynamic range compression in practice; in the Web setting, maybe via stuff like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/DynamicsCom... etc.?

[ Parent | on HN ]