Hector Martin

Today in "ffmpeg's AAC encoder is still a embarrassment and nobody should ever use it": OBS on Windows using it, at 320kbps, makes music sound like a low bitrate mp3 (metallic hi-hats, etc). No problem with a custom OBS build on Gentoo with libfdk_aac enabled, at *160* kbps.

ffmpeg's terrible AAC encoder (and its documentation claiming it's not terrible) is literally responsible for basically every Twitch streamer's audio being crappy. Also I'm pretty sure Twitter uses it too.

It's extremely sad that it's 2020 and internet streaming and Twitter video are stuck with 90s era 96kbps mp3 quality audio, **because of bad code**, and apparently nobody cares.

OBS doesn't let you pick a codec for streaming, but it *does* let you configure a "recording" output that actually goes to an RTMP stream, and *that* lets you pick codecs, so you can pick MP3 and get way better audio quality than with the ffmpeg AAC encoder (at a lower bitrate).

Honestly it's kind of funny how the open source world has best-in-class h.264 encoding (x264) and worst-in-class AAC encoding (ffmpeg aac) and those two are most often used together.

How much are you willing to bet that it's due to patent crap or some other stupid shit

No, the code is just bad, though the reason why everyone doesn't just ship libfdk_aac instead is due to its licensing.