Comment by a1o

8 hours ago

I think the biggest issue with Opus is the problem with its specification being lacking, see:

https://nothings.org/stb/stb_opus.html

This essentially causes opus to never be used in games or in things in stores that may have issues with specific licenses.

6 comments

a1o

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scratcheee  7 hours ago

That’s going a bit far. I’m in the games industry and have used opus regularly, it’s a great codec for games, often the hardware decoding is so restricted that we’re using software regardless so we might as well use something like opus.

The licensing restriction is unfortunate, but only restrictive for those with very specific goals, under normal conditions BSD is a wonderful license for game devs since you’re free to use the code and only have to add an acknowledgement somewhere.

I suppose a public domain game might hit the same limitation, though as a non-lawyer I would guess the chance of anyone with standing trying to sue anyone implementing from this spec is realistically zero (though I don’t fault stb for being unwilling to roll those dice!)

  • duskwuff  5 hours ago

    > under normal conditions BSD is a wonderful license for game devs since you’re free to use the code and only have to add an acknowledgement somewhere.

    And it's not as though libopus is an outlier in using a BSD license. A lot of other commonly used libraries have similar licenses; a few examples that come to mind which are likely to show up in games are zlib, curl, Lua, and SDL.

    • chaosharmonic  5 hours ago

      libopus isn't even an outlier in using it for a media format specifically. See: everything coming out of the Alliance for Open Media

kderbe  8 hours ago

This essay says it's not possible to make a public-domain implementation of Opus. But it could be released under BSD (as libopus is), which is fine for games, as evidenced by the Licenses section of the credits in many games.