Bug 183852 – Safari should be able to play WebM Opus audio

• Status: NEW
• Component: Media

[Ashley Gullen]

Test URL: https://www.scirra.com/labs/audioCodecTests/

Edge 17 will bring built-in support for Opus and Vorbis in Ogg or WebM containers in both <audio> and Web Audio. This aligns it with Firefox and Chrome in having built-in support for modern open audio codecs.

Apparently Safari already supports the Opus audio codec for its WebRTC implementation [1]. However it is not possible to play either Ogg Opus or WebM Opus with <audio> or the Web Audio API in Safari.

Safari is the last browser left that doesn't support Opus in <audio> or Web Audio. Adding support for it will considerably simplify the use of audio on the web, since it will mean there is consistent support for it across all major browsers. For example in our HTML5 game engine Construct 3 (editor.construct.net), we currently must ship a WebAssembly WebM Opus decoder, solely to support Safari. If Safari had built-in support - and it appears it already has the decoder for WebRTC - then we wouldn't need to ship our own decoder.

[1] https://webkit.org/blog/7726/announcing-webrtc-and-media-capture/

[Richard Bushell]

+1 for comprehensive support of Opus codec in Safari (MacOS and iOS) in WebM and MP4 containers. It is now supported in every other major browser!

[Chris Dumez]

Note that this was the source of Bug 218261.

[Ashley Gullen]

Safari 15 beta adds support for WebM Opus (thanks!) but only for <audio>, not decodeAudioData(), which is incompatible with existing web content. Please see issue 226922.

[Brad Isbell]

Safari seems to still be unable to support Opus-in-WebM in an `<audio>` element.

Is there something special that needs to be done, other than:

```html
<audio src="some-audio-file.webm"></audio>
```

(File is served with `Content-Type: audio/webm;codecs=opus`.)

Tested on Safari on iOS 15.4.1.

[Ashley Gullen]

As of Safari 17.4, at long long last, it seems WebM Opus is now finally supported consistently across iOS and macOS devices. However issue 245428 still reproduces and continues to block us using WebM Opus in Safari.

Meta point: nobody from Apple has updated this issue, so as usual we are left to figure things out for ourselves.