Our great sponsors
-
-
SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
-
-
Cider
A new cross-platform Apple Music experience based on Electron and Vue.js written from scratch with performance in mind. 🚀
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
The key to understanding this issue seems to be "-movflags +faststart". The TLDR is that Apple apparently isn't "fast-starting" their MPEG-4 files before distribution.
This became a thing when distributing QuickTime Movies on the internet became a thing (it's not an issue with random-access media), because one needed Movie metadata at the front of the file in order to support progressive playback. Because the MPEG-4 file format is effectively the QuickTime Movie file format, the need to put metadata at the front of the file continues if you want viewers/listeners to be able to play files as they're downloading.
That Apple isn't performing this extremely trivial pre-distribution process is extremely curious. It makes me wonder if this "common knowledge" was lost along the way, or if the people who would know this kind of super-obvious production step just aren't the same people in charge of Apple Music standards.
For anyone curious about what fast-start implementations look like:
https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/tools/qt-fastst...
The key to understanding this issue seems to be "-movflags +faststart". The TLDR is that Apple apparently isn't "fast-starting" their MPEG-4 files before distribution.
This became a thing when distributing QuickTime Movies on the internet became a thing (it's not an issue with random-access media), because one needed Movie metadata at the front of the file in order to support progressive playback. Because the MPEG-4 file format is effectively the QuickTime Movie file format, the need to put metadata at the front of the file continues if you want viewers/listeners to be able to play files as they're downloading.
That Apple isn't performing this extremely trivial pre-distribution process is extremely curious. It makes me wonder if this "common knowledge" was lost along the way, or if the people who would know this kind of super-obvious production step just aren't the same people in charge of Apple Music standards.
For anyone curious about what fast-start implementations look like:
https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/tools/qt-fastst...
> alternative Spotify front ends can only ever control the official Spotify app and Spotify Connect devices which is a real shame
I haven’t used Spotify for a long time since switching from Spotify Premium to Apple Music, but I know of a third party open source library that might be of interest to people who have Spotify Premium and would like to explore alternative frontends:
> librespot is an open source client library for Spotify. It enables applications to use Spotify's service to control and play music via various backends, and to act as a Spotify Connect receiver.
The API/SDK seems pretty good. I found this great seemingly full featured client last week that I've been enjoying: https://github.com/ciderapp/Cider
Good point about the watermarking, although 500 kB still seems rather generous for that: As far as I'm aware, the "watermark" only encompasses a few IDs plus name and e-mail of your Apple ID (compare https://github.com/avibrazil/un-istore).