Web Audio API - Browser ogg vs Windows Media Foundation mp3

Question

I'm playing with the Web Audio API in Firefox. MP4 Videos play really nice in Firefox through Windows Media Foundation. MP3 and OGG play also nice - but I wonder what what is better/faster or uses less system resources for the audio stuff. OGG with the browsers decoder or MP3 through Windows Media Foundation?

Answer 1

I implemented the Windows Media Foundation decoder in Firefox, and I did a lot of the work in Firefox's Ogg decoder as well.

It probably doesn't make a big difference to performance whether you use Ogg or MP3 with the WebAudio API in Firefox.

But, MP3 isn't supported in Firefox on all platforms yet, not even all Windows versions yet. So you need to provide both Ogg/Vorbis and MP3 anyway if you want your webpage to work in Firefox on all platforms.

You can test if the browser you're running in supports MP3 (or Ogg/Vorbis) using the HTMLMediaElement.canPlayType() API.

If all goes well we'll have MP3 support shipping in Firefox on all tier-1 platforms by Q3 or Q4 this year.