[vorbis-dev] Mime Type and Ogg (More)

[David A. Gatwood]

On Mon, 13 Nov 2000, Anthony Arcieri wrote:

> > I think part of the reason this issue keeps coming up is that there 
> > is no generalized "media framework" used on most Unix variants. 
> > Instead, there are a number of libraries which implement various 
> > formats, each with their own APIs.
> 
> There are several projects underway which are trying to do this, most
> notably gstreamer (http://gstreamer.sourceforge.net/)
> 
> I don't see this as the real problem.  I believe MIME's problem stems from
> the fact that it can only list one property of a particular file, which
> seems very shortsighted, especially when attempting to describe container
> formats.  

That's not a fault of MIME.  It's a fault of the implementation.  A mime
time for an instance of a container format could look like

        video/vorbis-audio-ogg-16-2-192-video-mpeg-30

if you wanted.  Take your pick as to how to open it based on the contents
of the container.  The container itself shouldn't have a mime type, but a
family of MIME types for each set of content.  Of course, the people who
regulate the MIME types would probably scream at that suggestion....

Anyway, one small design change to MIME is really needed to finish the job
-- a wildcard, e.g.

        video/vorbis-*

for any unknown cases.  Unfortunately, I don't think that's in the spec.

Later,
David

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