[Feature Request] Opus Transcoding

[phip123]

Hi, I have not found much to add a feature that enables server-side transcoding into Opus, actually only found this PR which wants to add support for Vorbis.

Is it somehow possible to enable Opus transcoding in the future or is it planned? In Symfonium it possible and works pretty flawless with Jellyfin.

Thanks!

[jmshrv]

It's something that I want to do, but there will be some requirements to get it working perfectly:

• Being able to stream OPUS on both platforms - Apple only support OPUS in CAF containers because they like to be annoying. From my testing, you can't just throw CAF through the internet as it's being transcoded, which is what the linked PR does for Vorbis/OGG
• DASH streaming - asking for the transcoded file directly causes issues with audio playback, namely causing seeking to be very inconsistent. Finamp currently uses HLS for transcoding, which works on both platforms and is supported by Jellyfin. The downside of this is that HLS only supports AAC (and MP3, but that's irrelevant since we can just use AAC). Fro, what I've read, DASH should allow us to stream any codec, including OPUS. DASH is not supported on the Jellyfin server, so that'd be something that I'd have to add there.
• Player backend rewrite - to solve the lack of support on iOS, I want to switch to something like MPV for the player backend. This should solve every issue around playback in Finamp, since MPV is awesome compared to the OS libraries. That's being tracked at #177.

I've been messing around with transcoded downloads at #215, which has fixed bugs in Jellyfin related to transcoding different formats. In theory, I could add an option to transcode OPUS on Android once the next release of Jellyfin comes out, which is kind of what the linked PR wanted to do.

[phip123]

Thanks for the quick reponse and exhaustive explanation!

I hope that this will the fixes will be released sooner than later to pave the way for Opus.

[texneus]

Hopefully this issue isn't lost to time. I was wondering why I could download but not stream these alternate formats. The obvious solution is if iOS doesn't want you to stream Ogg or Opus then disable those features in iOS releases. There should not be any reason to hold one platform back because of an arbitrary rule on another.

[jmshrv]

Downloading transcoded stuff doesn't depend on DASH streaming, although based on discussion in #151, it may not actually be required. It'll be Android (+ Linux, probably Windows?) only, but it's something that could be looked into