[whatwg] Including FLAC output in Audio Specs

[Charles Pritchard]

Currently, PNG and the Canvas tag set a solid precedent for including a 
lossless file format in media APIs. The PNG format, at its most basic, 
simply compresses a bitmap using deflate.

I'd like to see the same precedent followed in some of the new media 
APIs. FLAC provides a lossless audio format which can be used to package 
audio data from items like the MediaStream .record method.

How would we go about adding this into specifications?

I'll point out that many vendors support JPEG in addition to PNG, but 
that's not part of the specs, and it is a lossy format. It'd be nice to 
see something like Speex supported by vendors on audio APIs, but like 
JPEG, it's something that should remain a lesser priority to supporting 
a lossless format.

MediaStream record seems like it could accept a mime type, much as 
toBlob / toDataURL do on Canvas. That's one possible point of entry.

Does anyone have feedback on this issue? Is there any push-back out 
there on supporting FLAC as a baseline format for <audio> input and 
output? Obviously, it is bandwidth heavy, as is PNG.


-Charles