I would give you the benefit of the doubt that it might just be code shyness or perfectionism about something in its early stages, but it looks like the last codec you developed (“HALIC”) is still only available as Windows binaries after a year.
I struggle to see an upside to withholding source code in a world awash with performant open source media codecs.
1. Not FLAC
2. Not as open-source as FLAC
comes across as a patent play.
FLAC is excellent and widely supported (and where it’s not supported some new at-least-open-enough codec will also not be supported). I have yet to see a compelling argument for lossless audio encoders that are not FLAC.
FLAC doesn’t support more modern sampling formats (e.g. floating point for mastering), or complex multi channel compression for surround sound formats.
There just isn’t something better (and free) to replace it yet.
By the way, there will always be things to add! That feeling should not stop you from putting the source out there - you will still own it (you can license the code any way you like!) and you can choose what contributions make it in to your source.
From the encode.su thread and now the HA thread, you've clearly gotten people excited, and I think that by itself means that people will be eager to try these out. Lossless codecs have a fairly low barrier for entry: you can use them without worrying about data loss by verifying that the decoder returns the original data, then just toss the originals and keep the matching decoder. So, it should be easy to get people started using the technology.
Open-sourcing your projects could lead to some really interesting applications: for example, delivering lossless images on the internet is a very common need, and a WASM build of your decoder could serve as a very convenient way to serve HALIC images to web browsers directly. Some sites are already using formats like BPG in this way.
There is a chicken and egg problem with this strategy: Few people will want to, or even be able to, use this unless it’s open source and freely licensed.
The alternatives are mature, open or mostly open, and widely implemented. Minor improvements in speed aren’t enough to get everyone to put up with any difficulties in getting it to work. The only way to get adoption would be to make it completely open and as easy as possible to integrate everywhere.
It’s a cool project, but the reality is that keeping it closed until it’s “completed” will prevent adoption.
No great project started out great and the best open source projects got to their state because of the open sourcing.
Consider the problems you might be spending a lot of time solving might be someone else's trivial issue, so unless this is an enjoyable academic excercise for you (which i fully support), why suffer?
Halic = kiss Halac = raspy voice
In realtime applications, any processor within the last decade is far more than powerful enough to encode and decode in realtime. The first set of tracks in the results is 2862s long and even the slowest WAVPACK manages to encode it in >113x realtime and close to 250x realtime for decode.
For archival, high compression is important, but this codec doesn't compress better than WAVPACK either.
This is addressed in another response in this same thread regarding electricity usage.
These are basic sanity checks.
Something is wrong in the benchmark.
I don't know about FLAC, but from my knowledge of compression, this result seems sensible to me.
Smaller file = less bits to process = faster. FLAC level 5 is expected to give a smaller file than level 0, so it makes sense that decoding it will be faster. Of course, it's possible that some codecs enable more codec features at higher compression levels, which makes decoding slower, so it's not always a given, but higher compression giving faster decode doesn't seem unreasonable.
I personally keep everything in flac, but Bandcamp is seemingly the only service where that is a given.
> Though it is fast indeed! The decoding speeds are outright impressive given how FLAC is the fastest thing we ever saw ...
Ok, but what would make that useful?
Lower run-time means less electricity and less tying up of the CPU, making it available for other things. As a real-life example: i frequently use my Raspberry Pi 4 to convert videos from one format to another. This past week i got a Pi 5 and moved the conversion to that machine: it takes maybe 1/4th as much time. The principle with a faster converter, as opposed to faster hardware, is the same: the computer isn't tied up for as long, and not draining as much power.
Where is the source code? A detailed description of what the codec actually does? References to relevant publications?
All I see are two mystery Windows binaries, hosted on a forum I've never heard about. The fact that "encode.su" uses the world's most notorious domain extension doesn't inspire confidence, to put it mildly.
Encode.su (formerly encode.ru) is indeed the most known forum dedicated for data compression in general. So much that many if not most notable data compression projects posted to HN are often first advertised to that forum first (for example, Zstandard [1]).
The leaders in data compression and information theory are all from the former Soviet Union, so that's no cause for concern.
I think Andrey Markov started it all.
And later, you will learn to understand the depth of the contribution that the ffmpeg project provides :)
New world indeed...
I've searched the web and found not a single mention of "high availability" in the context of audio codecs. In fact, the top-ranked result was this very post, which doesn't explain what the term is intended to mean.
What does this mean? Why or how is this TLD the world’s most notorious?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.su
I would think that ICANN/whomever would have mandated its retirement / de-orbit, but a special exception was asked for:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2#Exceptional...
And I absolutely do at least a quick visual "sanity check" of the code before compiling and running newly announced software.
All it takes is one person somewhere who wants to look something over, and they heads-up the rest, and then many others do verify.
And that initial one does exist even though it's not you or me, the same way the author exists, the same way that at least once in a while for some things it is you or me.
He explicitly says it's not SIMD, which is nice because it rules out a way of cheesing it, but still...
There are some areas that I follow as-it-develops, but codecs and data compression is one that I'll use when ready. Still awaiting widespread av1 support/adoption.
The area most needing improvements IMO is with Bluetooth, especially Apple's support of codecs (where they're dropping support that worked in older macOS versions).
Still really really impressive to beat an established standard as an individual, that doesn't happen much.
Some of the SIMD optimization make compilers automatically. The others can be manually. These speeds can be obtained without using SIMD. Then there may be more with manual SIMD. I think this is what should be loved.
Apples and oranges. I don't need word processing software to be open source to understand how it works. A proportedly novel compression algorithm is a different story...
I can be totally honest with you: FLAC being open source is more valuable to me than any performance benefit you could ever possibly offer over it. It only becomes interesting if I can actually read the code and see what you did.
I am genuinely interested in what you've done here, and I sincerely hope you publish it.
Something else you can do is use (A)GPL3. This means you automatically grant patent licenses, and anyone building on your work also has to release their source. You can then separately sell proprietary licenses without any of these restrictions.
> TOS 8. All members that put forth a statement concerning subjective sound quality, must - to the best of their ability - provide objective support for their claims. Acceptable means of support are double blind listening tests (ABX or ABC/HR) demonstrating that the member can discern a difference perceptually, together with a test sample to allow others to reproduce their findings. Graphs, non-blind listening tests, waveform difference comparisons, and so on, are not acceptable means of providing support.
It’s basically just a forum post with a self-signed .exe download…
Oh well.
1. https://encode.su/threads/4025-HALIC-(High-Availability-Loss...
What interests me the most is the memory usage.
It seems that there is a serious effort. And your work clearly crushes other codecs. This will cause serious discomfort in some circles. I don't know much about HALIC, but it is said that it is also a very serious work.
There's no point in rushing for open source. First of all, improve your work as much as you can. If serious offers come later, you can evaluate them. Don't give up control.
