[Libav-user] Audio quality loss while encoding

[Brad O'Hearne]

On Apr 29, 2013, at 9:59 AM, Claudio Freire <klaussfreire at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Note that native aac encoder is experimental and mostly useless.
> 
> I see...
> ...I always understood "experimental" as "immature" but "will get
> there someday". I'm guessing I misunderstood?


As constructive feedback, I recommend removing aac entirely from the codebase if this is the case: "experimental" has a ring similar to "beta" or "on the way" -- like Claudio, I didn't derive "useless" and in effect disavowed from "experimental". If this is indeed the lay of the land with aac, and it is going to be left in, I'd put that in big bold letters in the doc or FAQ somewhere, along with DO NOT USE FOR PRODUCTION CODE. Otherwise, others may think that they are basically being early adopters of a codec that is going to be progressively improving, so if the experimental condition of the codec solves functions fine for their use-case, they would expect nothing but eventual improvement to it. 

I'd also be interested in what other codecs, if any, fall into this category so that I steer clear. If there is a doc listing which ones are considered production-ready and will be supported going forward, and which ones won't be, that would be a great reference...

Brad