mp3

Three points:

1. The MPEG Layer 3 encoders and decoders used in Trisquel are free
software (at least from a copyright perspective).

2. There may be patent issues in the United States potentially up to the
year 2017* but not in other countries anymore. That's just because the
US has absurd patent laws. As a non-American this is a non-issue to me,
and probably the same for the majority of Trisquel users.

3. I do agree that we should promote free formats, but I don't think
that removing MP3 support would be popular or constructive.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues

In an ideal world, Apple and Microsoft would support Vorbis and Opus natively in their browsers for audio, but they don't. It sucks because there are a huge percentage of users that use their browsers on the desktop and on mobile/tablet devices. At least Android supports Ogg and WebM natively in the OS and their default browsers.

Why do they only include AAC and MP3 instead? Maybe since both have ties to the organizations. Still, both Vorbis and Opus are patent and royalty free and get ignored. Its worse when the mobile market is controlled by major corporations who push non-free components and consumers buy them blindly.

As of the recent versions, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera support the VP9 and Opus codec in the WebM container. I know that Firefox has supported .opus files directly for a while, but not 100% about Chrome.

WebRTC may be the way to go for native communication in the browser and hopefully VP9 or Daala get standardized for video and Opus for audio. Of course there will be pushback from Apple and Microsoft as they will STILL push their patent laden multimedia codecs instead. :-(