926111 - Support FLAC files

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1195723

(Core :: Audio/Video, defect)

Description

[Elad Alfassa]

Most of my music is in FLAC format. My Android device used to be able to play these (before it died), FirefoxOS should too.

Comment 1

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

+1 as I have the same problem :-)

I'm not sure if the libraries we use for audio decoding on FxOS already support FLAC but if they don't there's a pure JS decoder already available so we might consider using that instead if it's fast enough (and suitable for the task):

http://audiocogs.org/articles/2012/06/15/flac-and-aurora/
https://github.com/audiocogs/flac.js

Comment 2

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

FLAC seems like a strange format to put on a phone, which has inherently limited storage space (the largest microSD card I can find is 32GB). I guess FLAC would work if you only want a handful of albums on your phone, but I've always preferred the idea of transcoding to a lossy format when putting music on a portable device. That's not to say I think this should be WONTFIX, but it's not something that I'd consider high-priority.

In any case, if we support this, I think we should add a decoder to Gecko, since otherwise we're just increasing the fragmentation of what Firefox supports. It would also let us write the decoder in C++, which would probably be a lot friendlier to battery life than a JS implementation.

Comment 4

[Dominic Kuo [:dkuo]]

I am not sure we have plans to support FLAC or not, let's change the component to Core::Video/Audio to catch the attention.

Comment 5

[Ralph Giles (:rillian)]

We have no plans to support FLAC. Argument in favour is the bug description. Arguments against:

- We don't want to encourage format proliferation on the Web platform.
- Firefox OS targets small devices where lossy formats make more sense.
- You can decode audio in js.

I would like my phone to play FLAC files too. Have you tried adding flac.js (or similar) to the Gaia music player? If the power consumption isn't awful perhaps we could ship that.

Comment 6

[Chris Pearce [:cpearce (Not reading bugmail)]]

Thanks for moving this into video/audio dkuo!

Comment 7

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

(In reply to Ralph Giles (:rillian) from comment #5)
> - You can decode audio in js.

That was my plan but I haven't found time to work on it yet since it's fairly low priority.

There's two big upsides to doing this in JS: first we don't add complexity in Gecko, second we can lazy load the necessary bits only when needed which is important since this will be probably used only by a minority of users.

Comment 8

[Dominic Kuo [:dkuo]]

(In reply to Chris Pearce (:cpearce) from comment #6)
> Thanks for moving this into video/audio dkuo!

No problem, Chris.

And if anyone is interested in porting some libs like flac.js to the gaia music player, feel free to ask me questions and probably I can give some help :)

Comment 10

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

Or the product should be moved back to Firefox OS.