As an advocate of FLAC, it has limited appeal beyond Hi-fi geeks / archivists / or music makers. Heck even storing local MP3 files is dated (though not recommended) with the proliferation of comprehensive streaming services (no endorsement on my part)
>Anti-goals - Copy prevention, DRM, etc. There is no intention to add any copy prevention methods. Of course, we can't stop someone from encrypting a FLAC stream in another container (e.g. the way Apple encrypts AAC in MP4 with FairPlay), that is the choice of the user.
The existence of DRM in a format is usually the reason something doesn't get supported, usually due to licensing or patent issues on the DRM, if not because of philosophical/political/social issues around supporting DRM itself.
Do you mean to suggest that Mozilla would be/should be/are subject to third-parties who want to restrict access to only DRM-supporting formats (I honestly don't know if they are, but it seems unlikely)? It's not like Mozilla has a music store and needs access to publishers/distributors that will only get on board if there's DRM. Support for more formats can only serve to help Mozilla's users and their market penetration (even if supporting more formats is more of a burden, development- and support-wise).
I think it's overkill for some use cases where lossy compression does a sufficiently good job. Most people can't consistently distinguish between high bit-rate lossy encodings and their original source material most of the time. Streaming FLAC will gobble a lot of bandwidth, and some people might find that to be a problem, especially on a capped data plan.
This answer is just being contrary to be contrary. 'Most people' can't distinguish 1080p from 4k from 6 ft away, yet people still stream 4k content, which 'gobbles bandwidth' too.
>'Most people' can't distinguish 1080p from 4k from 6 ft away
6ft away (and screen size) being key. From up close, everyone can and the difference is obvious. Whereas with lossy audio, a well encoded track will sound transparent to ~99% of people, no matter how they listen or what equipment they use.
Digital audio is pretty much a solved problem in terms of transparent encoding. Consumer digital video still has a long way to go.
(That said, I do support the use of FLAC, just for that extra safety and because it doesn't really cost too much.)
Is say most people not being able to feel the difference between 1080 and 4K to be inaccurate. I'm always seeing people look at 4K video after watching 1080 content and remarking how crisper it is. Of course there is a very large majority of people where what they have is good enough. When the iPhone went retina people argued that the extra pixels won't make a difference. Then they tried it. Now look where we are.
I found it a perfectly valid comment that illustrates the trade-offs that developers who have to code in support for the format would make, trade-offs that content streamers debating their codec choices would make, and trade-offs that consumers choosing their preferred format would make. Historically while streaming, lossy has been 'good enough' for reasons other than nothing else was supported.
