Given that Opus is built into the browser, is the format backwards compatible? Or will browsers need to update their Opus Libraries to get these changes?
All Opus releases since 1.0 are fully compatible with the specification (RFC 6716) and all future releases will also be. That's why we have standards. If we ever decided to make something that's not compatible, it would be called a different name.
That's so awesome. I guess the webrtc audio encoding libraries would need to be updated in the browsers to take advantage of these improvements though?
Even that should happen relatively quickly since so far we've also preserved API and ABI compatibility (since 1.0). Also, we're working closely with the Firefox and Chrome teams so they know what's going on with Opus.
