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> Is it though?

In my experience it's the buggiest browser out of the big three, and is often missing basic features like e.g.:

https://caniuse.com/?search=opus

Supported in Firefox for *12 years* now, in Chrome for 10, still no support in Safari.

They only "support" Opus audio in their special snowflake '.caf' container, which is super buggy and the last time I checked no open source program could even generate Opus '.caf' files that could be played by Safari on all Apple platforms. I ended up writing a custom converter which takes a standard '.opus' file and remuxes it on-the-fly (I only store '.opus' files on my server) into Safari-compatible '.caf' files, taking special care to massage it so that it avoids all of their demuxer/decoder bugs. You shouldn't have to do this to have cross-browser high quality audio!



> You shouldn't have to do this to have cross-browser high quality audio!

You don't, because HE-AACv2 is as universal as MP3 and better than Opus at low bitrates.

That said, Safari for macOS and iOS plays all the examples at https://opus-codec.org/examples/ except the last.


> That said, Safari for macOS and iOS plays all the examples at https://opus-codec.org/examples/ except the last.

That's because none of those samples are Opus files, except the last one. It even says so on the page.

> You don't, because HE-AACv2 is as universal as MP3 and better than Opus at low bitrates.

No. I did evaluate it before picking Opus. It only beats Opus at very low bitrates, and open source encoders for AAC suck.


> That's because none of those samples are Opus files, except the last one.

Ooof, I didn't even imagine that the official examples were WAV files. Here's an Opus audio file that plays fine in Safari on macOS and iOS: https://kur-static.biblica.com/audio/GEN_001.webm (Note: I have no idea what this content is, but could not find any English Opus content in the wild.)

> …and open source encoders for AAC suck.

Yeah, the disparity is a real bummer.


> Here's an Opus audio file that plays fine in Safari on macOS and iOS

Yeah, that has Opus packed into a Matroska container (which people usually use only for videos and not pure audio). I suppose that's another good way of getting around the problem!




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