Re: [Gnash] MP3 support

[Daniel James]

Hi Tomas,

> > The other potential scenario is that the free software community 
> > standardises on Vorbis as an animation soundtrack format, and then 
> > distributes its own animation players/plugins which are broadly Flash 
> > compatible, but also have 100% support for a truly open, published 
> > (vector art + sound) standard.

> When gnash becomes mature enough it could be used for such a purpose, but if it
> lies within the project goals it yet to decided/clearified. Otherwise promoting
> SVG might be an option.

I agree that an open standard created from scratch is potentially better 
than an adapted de-facto standard like Flash. However I'm not sure if 
SVG animation has any support for soundtracks, or any equivalent to 
ActionScript. As I understand it, SVG animations are intended by the W3C 
to be a vector-based replacement for simple animated GIFs, rather than 
for Flash games or movies.

http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/animate.html

Based on my own listening tests of Vorbis vs. MP3 at low bitrates, 
Vorbis in Flash could be a major bandwidth saver for companies and 
organisations serving a lot of Flash content. For example, I recently 
released previews of a full-length compilation album (about 70 minutes) 
through linuxaudio.org, using the quality=0 setting of Vorbis, and got 
the entire set of files down to 27.6MB - and they still sounded good, 
easily good enough for a Flash movie. So one minute of continuous audio 
would only be about 400KB. In my experience, MP3 sounds poor at less 
than 128KB/s, at which you would expect one minute of audio to be around 
1MB.

In the meantime, we will be aiming to package Gnash in 64 Studio, and 
hopefully will be able to give the project some good quality feedback.

Cheers!

Daniel