Web Assembly audio decoders highly optimized for size and performance

https://github.com/eshaz/wasm-audio-decoders

by ctoth • 2 years ago

145 27 2 years ago

wg0• 2 years ago

Interesting. What would be the use case for these? Audio editors?

duped3• 2 years ago

Browser support of some codecs is inconsistent, for example Safari's support for opus has been pretty bad/nonexistent (iirc this recently changed)

cupofjoakim• 2 years ago

I used to work at a place that developed a DAW in the browser, and yeah, we used a WASM Ogg Opus decoder to save on storage costs for our sound library. We earlier had to have mp3s for safari devices. With opus being opus we really wanted to provide it for the majority of devices as well as our server side streaming, and being able to provide opus support for safari ourselves was a godsend.

Edit: Should note that our decoder was developed in house and I have nothing to do with the project OP linked to.

pier25• 2 years ago

This. Even FLAC support isn't great.

lifthrasiir2• 2 years ago

Is that true even for mp3 though? Apparently it actually has a universal browser support up to MSIE 9 (!), while Ogg Vorbis and FLAC are now supported by all modern browsers after MSIE [1]. Opus seems to be the earliest format with less support than that, while this library only dates back to 2020.

[1] https://caniuse.com/?search=audio%20format

AshleysBrain• 2 years ago

WebM Opus is an open format that plays in all modern browsers now - including recent Safari releases. There are still some bugs though last I checked.

nsteel• 2 years ago

They look great for https://github.com/badaix/snapweb which is missing decoders for some formats.

austin-cheney3• 2 years ago

So, the JavaScript audio/video APIs already available in the browser are fully competent to build any kind of media player. The major limitation is that media players reliant on the browser APIs are limited to the codecs and containers supported by the browsers, which turns out to be a huge limitation.

A media library written for WASM with supplied codecs would not have that limitation, such that you could have an equivalent to VLC directly in a browser supporting immediate playback of any video/audio codec/container supplied in the WASM payload. The major advantage of a browser based application versus a desktop app is immediate playback of media via hyperlink without the soul crushing limitations Apple imposes on iOS.

gp• 2 years ago

Do you have a recommendation for having frame by frame control of a file?

I am trying to synchronize multiple video files that have uneven framerates. I have separate metadata containing the frame timing.

The video files are .ts (mpeg stream) files.

1oooqooq2• 2 years ago

what soul crushing limitations?

only time i had to resort to those canvas/wasm hacks was to force autoplay video for advertisement, against all users best interest.

xfalcox• 2 years ago

I wish the author would do the same for image decoding. iOS inability to draw a canvas with 4096x4097 dimensions means you can't use an Off screen canvas to go from file to RGBA array.

lioeters• 2 years ago

libav.js is in the direction you're thinking.

compilation of the libraries associated with handling audio and video in FFmpeg — libavformat, libavcodec, libavfilter, libavutil and libswresample — for WebAssembly

https://github.com/Yahweasel/libav.js/

EDIT: Looking closer at the above I don't see image formats, only audio and video. Maybe this gets closer:

Decodes images using Rust's image crate compiled to WebAssembly.
It supports decoding PNG, JPEG, WEBP, GIF, BMP, ICO, TGA, and several others.

https://github.com/josephrocca/wasm-image-decoder

nilslice• 2 years ago

awesome! would love to help get distributions of these as Extism wasm plugins so they can be used in Go/Rust/PHP/Ruby/OCaml/Java/C++/C#/bunch more languages...

jauntywundrkind• 2 years ago

Probably a good basis for a shoutcast client! So little info on it & I really doubt it's supported in any browsers. Even though it's mp3 with a little metadata sprinkled in every X bytes. https://www.radiotoolbox.com/community/forums/viewtopic.php?...

doublerebel• 2 years ago

There are lots of docs and info available for shoutcast/icecast servers and clients. Here’s a couple implementations in javascript:

https://github.com/livebassmusicrightnow/even-nicercast/blob...

https://github.com/TooTallNate/node-icy

WASM would be total overkill. The mpeg stream is readable natively in the browser — that’s how I served the client when I was running livebassmusicrightnow.

eshaz• 2 years ago

Hey, author of the wasm-audio-decoders library here. Actually, I wrote this library for this very reason to supplement my other library, icecast-metadata-player which is an Icecast (Shoutcast) browser client with ICY metadata support. https://github.com/eshaz/icecast-metadata-js

hoten• 2 years ago

If I'm already compiling ogg vorbis/opus/minimp3/etc via emscripten (allegro app), is there still big benefit to using these instead?

beepbooptheory• 2 years ago

If they are all web workers, how do you use them in an Audio Worklet?

muth02446• 2 years ago

This scares me a little: There was a security alert on the page with the C-code from mp3.

Web Assembly audio decoders highly optimized for size and performance

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