Re: [playogg-discuss] Why not playOpus?

[Ivan Privaci]

On Saturday, January 24, 2015 07:49:09 PM CodeHero wrote:
> I just saw the playOgg campaign and it looks like a nice idea. However
> I've been wondering why you did not advertise opus instead as even
> xiph.org says that opus makes other lossy codecs like Vorbis and Speex
> obsolete
> https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#Does_Opus_make_all_those_other_lossy_codecs_ob
> solete.3F
[...]
I completely agree, personally, though the FSF has unceremoniously abandoned 
this campaign (for the last half-decade!), and have never shown any interest 
in the replacement campaign ("playfreedom"[1]) that they were collecting email 
addresses for 4 years ago.  Quite aggravating, as this is one of the few 
campaigns going that could be focussed entirely on encouraging users to take 
advantage of being able to do something, rather than telling them to give up 
something. (Opus so far seems to be genuinely better than any other audio 
codec out there for ANY application other than lossless archiving and 
EXTREMELY low bitrate [<8-10kbps] voice-over-IP, and it's already surprisingly 
widely supported, if not well-advertised).

I have SOME hope that the FSF might start considering this to be an important 
and potentially-effective topic to address again someday, since they have at 
least some involvement with MediaGoblin[2] [unfortunately I don't think they 
directly sponsor its developement, but they did allow the project to use the 
FSF's infrastructure to run a donation drive, which let them hire at least one 
full-time developer for the year], which could someday be an ideal platform 
from which to promote "playing freedom", once support for other-than-WEBMv1 
audio is implemented (I'd LOVE to see .opus become the "default" output format 
for this, given opus' insanely great versatility and sound-quality, not to 
mention [in my opinion] the superiority of vorbiscomment metadata to the 
obscene collection of mostly-video-centric pigeonholes that is WebM's metadata 
tag format[3].)

This  is one campaign that I could really get into, if the FSF ever decides 
it's a worthwhile topic again. Is anyone from the FSF still reading this 
mailing list? What would it take to actually get "playfreedom" kicked off for 
real?

[1] http://playfreedom.org 

[2] http://mediagoblin.org

[3] http://hpr.dogphilosophy.net/?p=111 (“Audio Metadata in Ogg, MP3, and 
others” (retrieved 2015-02-24)