Playing AAC files (M4A, iTunes-encoded) with FAAD instead of FFMPEG

Submitted by Kiike on Sat, 2010-03-06 17:16

Forums:

Good day.
I have been playing around with MOC. It's a player that I use on a daily basis, several hours per day. I find it awesome, and great to use on my low-profile laptop. With the default compilation options for my distro, I saw that it wasn't possible to play M4A files without using the --without-aac flags when configuring moc, so that it would resort to FFMPEG and play the files fine.
Faad2 decodes the M4A files MOC won't. Is there any way to use MOC without FFMPEG for playing M4A files? Unfortunately, half of my media library is in this format, so I wouldn't transcode.
Thanks in advance,

Additional info:
Distro: Arch Linux PPC
MOC version: svn commit #2245
Faad: v2.7
Current ./configure flags:
./configure --prefix=/usr --disable-debug \
--disable-libFLACtest --disable-ltdl-install --without-rcc \
--without-musepack --without-aac \
--without-vorbis --without-flac --without-speex \
--without-timidity --without-curl --without-oss --without-jack \
--without-wavepack --without-samplerate --without-display2

Kiike

Sat, 2010-03-06 19:43

I see in the changelog that faad2 can be used at compile-time, so I replace --without-aac for --without-ffmpeg, and even though it will build the aac plugin, it will fail when playing M4A (AAC) files complaining that "Not a valid (or unsupported) AAC file" which faad2 reads fine.

tomaszg

Thu, 2010-03-11 00:27

Hmm, I had the oposite experience. faad2 would not play some files, but ffmpeg was working ok. It was especially the case with alac files (loseless).

I removed aac/faad2 plugin and all aac files work ok now.

jcf

Wed, 2011-11-30 01:15

Although the FAAD2 command line tools can play the M4A format they do
so using the internal libmp4ff library which, according to the FAAD2
developers, was never meant to be used outside of FAAD2 and the use
of which they discourage. The FAAD2 library, which MOC's AAC decoder
plugin uses, does not support M4A demuxing.

One alternative suggested is the mp4v2 library, but its licensing is
incompatible with the GPL which MOC uses and nor is it obvious that it
provides a way to simply obtain the demuxed AAC stream to feed into FAAD2.

Given that FFmpeg can decode M4A format files natively or can be
configured to do so using FAAC, there seems little point in stuggling
to support the M4A format using FAAD2 directly.

M4A has been removed from the MOC AAC decoder plugin in SVN r2378.