[IgorC]

Originally Posted by Nintendo Maniac 64

So um, as someone on the outside, I've got to ask - outside of DRM and satisfying "not invented here" syndrome, what benefit does xHE-AAC provide over something like Opus?

Both Opus and xHE-AAC are hybrid music/speech formats and have essentially same quality. xHE-AAC is slightly better than Opus at 16-32 kbps, quality at 48-64 kbps is the same for both and Opus is slightly better than all family LC-AAC/HE-AAC/xHE-AAC at higher bitrates.

Many people try to market a feature of xHE-AAC as switching between bitrates as something outstanding and so on. But in reality it's not a premium feature and Opus supports it from the very beginning. More here https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Opus

Also xHE-AAC is a high delay codec and it's not suitable for real time communications like VOIP calls etc. Company who wants real time communication should also adopt low-delay xHE-AAC fork (EVS). And if You want stereo EVS then this is just another extension. So we got mutltiple codecs and/or extensions:
1.xHE-AAC
2.low delay EVS
3.EVS stereo extension (aka IVAS)
...
It's sort of LC-AAC, HE-AAC, HE-AACv2, Low delay AAC (LD-AAC), Enhanced LD-AAC ( low delay HE-AAC) aka ELD-AAC, ELD-AAC v2 (HE-AACv2 low delay), xHE-AAC, EVS ( low delay xHE-AAC), IVAS (low delay stereo xHE-AAC)...

While Opus is just one single format for everything: high-,low-delay, stereo and multichannel codec.
So I'm not surprised that Opus is popular in internet community while xHE-AAC support is non-existent. Android 9 will get an xHE-AAC decoder but there is still no any encoder