[ogg-dev] Album art - requirements

[Mathias Kunter]

>I don't mind (and approve of) the idea of reusing as much of proven
>standards as we can.  But putting it in a Vorbis comment will in fact
>piss off people who then can't play the file.  It's not as much a
>qestion of displaying the tag as text (although that is a concern)
>it's that most hardware players that only have 10-20kB available for
>stream buffering won't be able to decode the headers and thus won't be
>able to play the file.

OK, I haven't been aware of those problems with hardware players. Are most of them actually unable to skip comment fields which are (too) big for them?
And wouldn't cause any other embedded cover art implementation compatibility breaks with existing hardware players too?

Beside that, I think this problem is manageable since
--> you can also link the cover art within the ID3 / FLAC tag structure and therefore keep the size at a level which is supported by hardware players,
--> notify the user within a software tagger when *embedding* the cover art that his hardware player *might* not support this and that the user should first test this on his hardware.
--> software developers can easily adopt their cover art implementations for OGG files because of the standard which is already in wide use (if this is even necessary, C and C++ based software shouldn't face a problem anyway because of the leading zero bytes)

The currently existing base64-encoded thing within the vorbis comments also breaks with hardware support and has no support for any additional cover art information, I therefore think the ID3 / FLAC tag structure is simply better and more flexible.

-m