[ogg-dev] metadata on the wiki

[Ian Malone]

On 14/09/2007, Daniel Aleksandersen <aleksandersen+xiphlists at runbox.com> wrote:
> The biggest problem with Vorbis comments are too loose specifications and
> too little standardisation.
>

> I have made a some suggestions, but as I have said earlier: Vorbis comments
> are no good when it comes to including information about musicans, labels,
> and other involved persons and organisations. A XML replacement to Vorbis
> comments would provide better mechanisms for defining this.
>

Incidentally, and bearing in mind kfish's comment about
complimentary technologies, the wiki is accumulating
comments about metadata streams replacing vorbiscomment.
I don't think this is realistic for several reasons.  The most
obvious is simplicity; both of implementation and use.  Even
given a working media description metadata framework
vorbiscomments are significantly simpler to implement and
interpret, and they survive (de-)muxing of streams much
more readily.  XML metadata interpetation would require
a lot of support components.  It's made more difficult
by one of the things that would be most useful, the
inclusion of non-Xiph metadata types.

vorbiscomments also give a simple handle for things like
'currently playing'.  In fact working XML metadata would
possibly make vorbiscomments more useful too.  I could
fill in artist and title tags according to what I wanted my
portable player to display, confident that the precise
information (composer, performer etc.) is still neatly stored
away.

The widespread support for vorbiscomments is another
issue: the entire installed Vorbis base (I list only Vorbis
because I don't know too much about the rest, but it's
likely similar) uses vorbiscomments.  Existing encodes
with any kind of metadata mostly use them (excepting
crazy people who try to apply ID3 or APE).

Finally there's no current media metadata stream
implementation.  Until we know what it looks like it's
really too early to claim what it will do.  In conclusion
metadata streams certainly wont replace
vorbiscomment any time soon and there are good
reasons to believe they never will (remember we can't
make the end-product implementor *do* anything).
Unless there's a very strong argument I've missed.

-- 
imalone