[Advocacy] Re: Is Microsoft being cruel to OGG?

[illiminable]

Hi there Carlo,

I wasn't previously on this list, but someone pointed me to your post.

Just to clear a few things up...

I created the .oga and .ogv extensions for use on windows. They were created 
for a few reasons... the primary one being the way that the media library 
works in WMP.

The media library separates files in to the audio and video category based 
on extension alone. Since these categories are where most users existing 
files are, and that these categories have special additional metadata 
columns specific to their type, it is useful to be able to get .ogg files 
into the appropriate category.

Several people complained that .ogg files were not being put into the media 
library. However they are put in the library... just in a fairly useless 
place. This being the special "Other media" category, which most people 
don't even notice exists. The problem with having .ogg files go here, is 
that they are not where the user expects them to go, and they are not with 
their other files in the correct audio/video category. This category also 
lacks metadata columns which are specific to that type of media.

Since an .ogg file can be either audio or video, it cannot be put in either 
of the audio or video categories. By allowing the player to recognise the 
.oga and .ogv it allows the user to *if they wish* rename their files 
appropriately so they can be integrated (though still incompletely) with the 
media library.

One thing i am curious about though, you imply that you went to install 
WMP10 on a clean install of windows XP, and it asked you about .ogg files. I 
just made a clean install, and it made no mention of .ogg, .oga, .ogv files. 
However, if you had already installed my ogg codecs, they would have added 
entries to WMP's registry area telling WMP to associate itself with those 
file extensions. So when you went to install WMP10 it looked in the registry 
of your existing WMP installation and found those entries. I tested this, by 
installing my codecs and then running the WMP10 installer, and then the 
entries did in fact appear in the list. So those entries are not created by 
MS at all, they are created by my codecs.

As to it being a deliberate ploy to make it more complicated for the average 
user. Firstly ,just to clear it up, MS had nothing to do with it. And 
secondly in my opinion the opposite is true. Almost every media format i can 
think of uses a similar convention of having different file extensions for 
audio and video... eg mp3/mpg, mp4/m4a, wmv/wma. Having a single extension 
which makes it impossible to tell from the extension whether it is audio or 
video, is actually more confusing for most users.

The other thing is, even though my codecs support those extensions, i do not 
encourage people to use them, unless they want to. They are not "official" 
extensions. This is basically an undocumented "feature". I was unaware that 
this association was displayed when you installed WMP10 over a previous 
install after my codecs were installed.

However when i did this test i did notice something which is probably what 
bothered you... it doesn't appear to ask whether you want to associate .ogg 
files to WMP. It will however play them, but i had never noticed this 
before, since i had always previously installed the codecs after installing 
WMP. I will have to have a closer check on the registry entries made, as it 
was definately not my intention to only offer .oga and .ogv to the exclusion 
of .ogg. This is a bug in the installer somewhere that is missing a registry 
entry, or perhaps WMP doesn't offer to associate to things that don't 
associate themself with it's library, i will have to look into that.

So, i assure it wasn't a conspired effort to make things more complicated, 
and it was just a bug that .ogg does not appear in that list, and no-one had 
ever pointed it out to me until now, and i didn't even know that list was 
ever displayed.

Hope that clears things up...

Thanks,

Zen