Sorry, the correct link to the AC3/EAC3 announcement is here: http://developer.dolby.com/News/Dolby_Audio_Support_on_iOS.aspx

feature request, give to PM to evaluate.

It's also worth noting that Windows (as of Windows 8) also ships with a built-in AC3 decoder. See: http://developer.dolby.com/tools-tech.aspx#windows

Microsoft Edge and Safari are both shipping AC3 support using the built-in, free-to-use AC3 decoders in macOS and Windows. See http://developer.dolby.com/tools-tech.aspx#browser

Has there been any progress on AC3 support?

I found a nice test video. MP4 container, AC3 audio track.

The Dolby Digital "Amaze" trailer: http://thedigitaltheater.com/index.php/dolby-trailers/

Download link: https://we.tl/wRwJ3EJt32

I've attached a screenshot of the codec details.

This video works perfectly in Safari. It should also work in Edge. Chrome plays the video, but with no audio.

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	image.png 83.1 KB View Download

Hello all, 

Thanks for writing to support AC3. As mentioned, Chrome currently doesn't support the AC3 codec. "Passing through" is unfortunately, not a simple decision either for reasons of security and licensing. 

That said, I would like to use this bug to gather interest on AC-3 support. 

Please star it to a) be updated on any decisions and b) it gives us an indication on how many users and/or providers might be interested in this. 

Thanks. 

> "Passing through" is unfortunately, not a simple decision either for reasons of security and licensing. 

I'm not a lawyer and haven't seen the exact terms, but my understanding is that Apple and Microsoft have already paid licensing fees to Dolby so that all first and third-party apps on their platforms can use the codec without needing to negotiate a license.

Also, FWIW, Dolby wrote this in their recent SEC filings: "Patents relating to our Dolby Digital technologies, from which we principally derive our licensing revenue, have begun to expire and the remaining patents relating to this technology generally expire between now and 2017."

> That said, I would like to use this bug to gather interest on AC-3 support. 

Sounds good.

This issue is important, because many other projects that depend on Chromium use it to play video and without this issue getting fixed those projects cannot proceed with features that users request or have to implement costly workarounds.

Finally, on 19.03.2017, the last of Dolby's patents over the AC-3 codec expired. You can read more about it on https://ac3freedomday.org (cached page: https://web.archive.org/web/20170401170436/https://ac3freedomday.org).

I think AC-3 decoding support should be enabled in Chromium for all platforms, not only for macOS.

Reassigning after PM changes. Keep in mind most content on the internet (DD+, etc) is E-AC3 not AC3, so adding support AC3 to Chromium does not bring much benefit.

E-AC-3 / Enhanced AC-3 / Dolby Digital Plus patent US6246345 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6339757) only affects encoders, not decoders.

I've opened  issue #713660 

Many projects e.g. Electron (https://electron.atom.io) and Chromecast firmware depend on Chromium formats support.

 Issue 713660  has been merged into this issue.

I think it would be better to split this issue into two different issues. While AC-3's patents have expired, it seems that E-AC-3 patents have not.

As far as I know, the decoder of ac3 and e-ac3 is the same. So it's not necessary to split this issue.

Are you sure this is the case? Wikipedia says "Dolby Digital Plus [E-AC-3] bitstreams are not directly backward compatible with legacy Dolby Digital [AC-3] decoders". It doesn't have a source for that claim though...

When deciding on whether to add this codec or not, please also note that a lot of video content (e.g. DVD) uses AC-3 as its audio codec. Since Chromium OS's built-in video player uses the <video> element too, it's not only about codecs used on the web, but also other commonly used codecs.

As for the specific implementation (see [1]), I believe it would be best to add this to the set of codecs for the 'Common' branding, since there doesn't seem to be a 'ChromiumOS' branding. Adding it to the 'ChromeOS' branding would make this format unnecessarily unavailable to Chromium OS users, now that AC-3 is no longer patent encumbered. If adding it to the 'Common' branding would pose an issue (i.e. there are reasons not to support it on platforms other than Chromium OS/Chrome OS), it would likely be best to add a 'ChromiumOS' branding.

[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/+/master/chromium/scripts/build_ffmpeg.py

Are there any update on this? 

For example Fedora is enabling the support ac-3 in Fedora 26 (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-26-AC3-Codec and https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/03/22/another-media-codec-on-the-way/)

It's been a few months with no, update, has anything new happened regarding this feature or should it be considered dead?