[vorbis-dev] Re: [theora-dev] Re: Ogg Internet Drafts - create application/ogg-vorbis, application/ogg-tarkin, etc.

[Conrad Parker]

On Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 11:49:38PM +1100, Silvia.Pfeiffer at csiro.au wrote:
> 
> Now, leading on from here to file extensions is a different issue. I
> would recommend to have different file extensions for each of the
> defined Ogg media mappings ogg-theora, ogg-vorbis and ogg-speex. My
> reasoning is that it makes it easier for programs to map from the file
> extension to the MIME type and from there to the application to use
> without having to look inside the file. My check of MIME types also
> found that mostly a MIME type maps to many file extensions, but one file
> extension belongs mostly to one MIME type only. I believe that for speex
> a distinct extension ".spx" is already in use. Any takes?
> 

yep, .spx is used for Ogg Speex files.

and I totally agree with your take on file extensions vs. mime types; eg.
the /etc/mime.types file which Apache uses to work out the content
type of a file it is delivering maps single mime types to one or more
file extensions, and not the reverse.

o, it's not quite enough that desktop environments and 'file -i' can
work without file extensions, we should still respect them and not use
one file extension for multiple mime types. (Conversely, if all Ogg files
were to have the same file extension, they should all be given the same
mime type).

IMHO different Ogg formats should have different mime types and file
extensions, and applications should register with their desktop environment
the full list of formats they can handle.

In this way, Ogg differs from Quicktime because Ogg is not a media
framework, it is a file format spec. A media framework, such as gstreamer
or libxine, can itself specify the full list of Ogg based mime types it
has codecs for.

The end-user experience is the same -- most of the time the desktop
environment launches the same media app to view files, and the end-user
doesn't need to know anything about mime-types for this to work. However
if a user wants to launch a specific app to work with a specific mime-type,
they are not precluded from doing so, as would be the case if they all
had the same mime-type.

<p>Conrad.
www.metadecks.org
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