Developers of the multimedia package ffmpeg recently announced the creation of their own decoder implementation for the sound encoding format xhe-aac (Extended High-Efficiency AAC) as defined in the ISO/IEC 23003-3 standard. The Xhe-AAC decoder has been accepted into the main code of FFMPEG and is now available for use. It can be utilized for most Xhe-AAC stereo streams, although streams of SBR, USAC, and MPEG-H with voluminous sound, as well as speech coding, are not currently supported. The developers have assured that support for USAC and SBR will be added in the near future.
Xhe-AAC is a codec used in Netflix streaming and plays a significant role in digital broadcasting technologies like digital radio mondiale. This codec is known for its ability to support a wide range of bitrates (from 12 to 300 kbit/s), high compression efficiency, playback with consistent volume levels, maintaining clarity at any volume, additional control profiles for dynamic range in noisy environments, and the addition of metadata to help restore losses on the receiving end.