[vorbis-dev] File extensions

Dan Miller dan at on2.com
Mon Jan 13 08:52:14 PST 2003



> Sylvia Pfeiffer said:
> 
> > 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 don't see how this helps, since the MIME type by definition calls one and only one application.  Either that application can support the standard OGG codecs (Vorbis, Speex, Flac, Theora...), or it can't.  If it can, it doesn't need a plethora of file extensions to do so. That information is (or certainly should be!!) encapsulated into the OGG header as some sort of descriptor, ala Quicktime & AVI ("VORB", "SPEX", "FLAC", "THEO").  The point of a format like OGG is to encapsulate these issues into the format; wrangling that info out to the file extension seems just plain wrong, especially if you're not going to have a different MIME type for each (ie a Vorbis player, a Speex player...)

I would make exactly one exception to this rule: we should define .ogv to m
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