[flac-dev] Next generation WebM and FLAC

[James Haigh]

On Jun 19, 2012 6:18 PM, "Ralph Giles" <giles
<giles at thaumas.net>@<giles at thaumas.net>
thaumas.net <giles at thaumas.net>> wrote:
>
> On 12-06-19 10:08 AM, James Haigh wrote:
>
> > I have proposed to WebM to use FLAC in a future version. Since FLAC was
> > designed a decade ago, I was wondering if there were any new compression
> > techniques that FLAC could use in a new version to improve compression
> > ratios.
>
> The short answer is yes, but for it to be work promoting a new standard,
> you really want to do *significantly* better than flac, like lossless at
> half the file size. That's a lot harder than an extra 10% or 20%
> compression. A great research project, in other words, but I think we'd
> do better to concentrate resources on improving support for the existing
> flac format which is very widely adopted.

Yeah, starting with Firefox.

There's no rush, I'm talking next couple of years. Right now promoting WebM
and other existing open standards is my priority too, I've actually put in
a formal complaint with the BBC to move from Flash to WebM encoded HTML5,
since Adobe announced discontinuation of Flash for Firefox on Linux.

Note that 50% is silly, lossless compression is asymptotic. I 2nd Martin,
once you have high-density entropy, there's little more 'air' to
squeeze-out. 10-20% would be worth it if it helps adoption, although it's
worth studying how close we already are to the asymptote of entropy. How
much would be saved? How long would it take? Is it really worth it?

Can wavelets be applied to lossless sound compression? I've seen that
they're used for JPEG 2000, Dirac, and was planned for Tarkin, all of which
image compression standards. But what about audio?

James.

>
>  -r
>
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