Playing opus files under ubuntu

Question

Opus is a new audio codec standard for audio on the web. Features include:

• Better compression than mp3/ogg/aac.
• Good for both music and spoken word.
• Dynamically adjustable bitrate, audio bandwidth, and coding delay.
• Good for real-time and pre-recorded applications.

Since 2012, all major browsers have had support for playing Opus files in HTML and elements directly. Ref: http://xiph.org/~giles/2012/opus/. UPDATE: check this out for more info on Opus.

However, the question is, how to play opus files under ubuntu normally, without using the browsers? What I found are:

• Opus players on 12.04 relies on /dev/dsp, which is obsoleted
• Opus codec has to be custome build into audacious in order for audacious to work

Time has passed, can opus files being played easily under ubuntu now? Also, how about playing from the command-line?

Solution

If you are still using Ubuntu 12.04, I suggest you update to the current LTS release (14.04). The default music player included with Ubuntu 14.04 is called Rhythmbox and can play Opus files.

Comments

[DifferentPseudonym]

Rhythmbox can't play .opus files.

[Vitaly Zdanevich]

Any cli solution without reencoding?

[John Lindgren]

I can't tell you the Ubuntu package names, but on Linux generically you have several alternatives: play from SoX, ffplay -nodisp from FFmpeg, or audacious -Hq with a new enough version of Audacious, just to name a few.