AAC+

[davidc]

Hey !

I know there is AAC support in jplayer for flash/HTML5 but is there any project on supporting AAC+ streaming for flash ? Is it even possible ? I cannot find reliable sources about AAC+ support with Flash.

david

[Mark Panaghiston]

I've not looked into that. Since jPlayer tried to work everywhere, we recommend using the AAC-LC encoding... And since LC stands for low complexity, I do not know if any mobile devices support that format at all.

[davidc]

I'm interested in AAC+ (HE) since lots of shoutcast streams use it. A modified swplayer seem to be able to read flv encapsulated AAC+ streams as seen here.

I wonder how much work is there to do to make jplayer flash read that kind of stream.

[Mark Panaghiston]

Not sure that FLV encapsulated AAC+ counts. You can slap quite a few different things into an FLV and it will then work in Flash.

The jPlayer Flash may well work fine with AAC-HE already. I have never checked though. Neither with static urls or a stream.

Download the demo zip and plug in the urls for the AAC+ stream and see what happens. In jPlayer 2.0.0 you'd use the m4a setMedia property... In the latest jPlayer 2.0.33, you could use the fla property to indicate an audio flv format and test with that encapsulated flv too...

Direct from the AAC+ stream would be best, as it is more likely to be acceptable to browsers in HTML5. It might not be supported everywhere.

[davidc]

I can read any AAC-HE file with jplayer but can't manage to read a stream of the same format. I cannot read any AAC+ stream that comes from a shoutcast source for example. Lots of people on different forums seem to convert the streams in flv before reading them with any flash player and I wonder why...

by the way, thanks for your replies !

[Bruno C]

On Thursday, 25 August 2011 15:19:35 UTC-4, Mark Panaghiston wrote:

I've not looked into that. Since jPlayer tried to work everywhere, we recommend using the AAC-LC encoding... And since LC stands for low complexity, I do not know if any mobile devices support that format at all.

Here is the result of my searches:

Apple

Apple iOS developer doc says that they support AAC+/HE-AAC in containers such as .m4a

You can specify the codec into a .m3u file, by setting  EXT-X-STREAM-INF to mp4a.40.5

Apple Safari developer doc says: Safari on the desktop (Mac OS X and Windows) supports all media supported by the installed version of QuickTime, including any installed third-party codecs.

Which in this Quicktime knowledge base article support AAC+ in both Windows and MacOSX.

From there, I see that support to HE-AAC had been added to Quicktime and other Apple ecosystem products in September 2009. But it says that VBR is not supported by iTunes.

Google

Android SDK doc support the same thing as iOS (and more).

While Chrome documentation is not as good and clear as Apple, I see here that AAC+ support had been added to Chrome 5 more than one year ago. And as a Chrome user, I saw it worked before.

Adobe Flash

In this Adobe flash release note, starting flash 9 update 3, version 9.0.115.0. HE-AAC codec is supported since December 2007

I was wondering if shoutcast can show me a real example of that... because there is a lot of AAC+ stream. But it can only be played trough OS native player.

They can't because of the way they encode it.

Microsoft

Since Internet Explorer 9, support for HTML5 audio elements had been added. This MSDN IE9 documentation says that AAC in MP4 container.

And from this other document, AAC family codecs are only available in Windows 7.

Only the combination of Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 9 or 10 support native HTML5 AAC+.

For other Internet Explorer, flash is mandatory to use jPlayer.

See "Adobe Flash"

In this Windows 7.1 SDK Documentation, HE-AAC is supported with the same 48 Kbps limit as in iOS.

The 7.0 documentation I found in .CHM also says the same thing.

Firefox

No support for AAC nor AAC+. It support only OGG, WebM and WAV.

Flash is mandatory to use AAC with jPlayer.

See "Adobe Flash"

Opera

Same as for Firefox, except that WebM support had beed somewhere in version 11.0

RIM

From this blackberry supported media types official PDF file, support to AAC & AAC+ seem standard.

It is supported in their Playbook too. In fact they were sued for that.

My Conclusion

I do not see why it is not supported. In most case, falling back to flash fix this.

The problems seem to be related to the fact that most browser/OS have strict list of encoding options and stream containers.

[Robert Hall]

FYI: Regarding Flash and ShoutCast style AAC streams, where they are packaged a bit differently than what Flash requires. There is a nice ActionScript 3 library called ThunderSnow that allows you to consume ShoutCast style AAC streams without transcoding it or needing any other server side interaction like Wowza, etc. It does the heavy lifting of parsing the metadata and stream info into the proper format on the fly in AS3. I have played with it, and it works pretty well. 

URL:  http://thundersnow.thebitstream.com/

When I am finished with the fork of Jplayer that I have been working on that adds FMS rtmp support here:

https://github.com/rmhall/jplayer

I may look into incorporating the thundersnow library into jPlayer so it could support ShoutCast style AAC streams through Flash directly. I haven't looked deeply enough into the ThunderSnow API to see if it would line up as well as rtmp support has for me. Not sure either how much demand there would be for this, but it's worth taking a look. 

Regards,

Rob