[whatwg] Including FLAC output in Audio Specs

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 12 Oct 2011, Charles Pritchard wrote:
>
> 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.

Since the MediaStream API has moved to the WebRTC WG, I recommend raising 
this there instead.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'