[vorbis-dev] Multi-stream vorbis...

[André Pang]

On 02/06/2004, at 6:28 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

> What kinda piece of crap platform are you on that doesn't use file 
> magic
> to determine type or at least provide the 'file' command?
>
> Is windows this bad?

Windows uses normally file extensions to associate programs with what 
type of files they can manipulate.  The real story is a bit deeper than 
that: e.g. Windows Explorer shell extensions can do some 'file'-magic 
to determine what type of file the thing _really_ is, but the standard 
double-click-to-open action just uses file extensions for its mappings.

You may like to contend that in a perfect world, all files have no file 
extensions whatsoever, and we all simply rely on guesswork mechanisms 
like UNIX's file command to guess what type of file it is.  However, 
reality dictates that it's not like that: file extensions are in 
wide-spread use today, and we should do the right thing to support 
them.

>> c) You lose the ability to have seperate players be the default 
>> player for
>> different types of files... for example i have iTunes attached to all 
>> audio
>> files, and WMP attahed to all video files.
>
> So if you want to use differnt media players for differnt content use a
> wrapper that gets launched and figures it out, or lobby your OS maker 
> to
> make the launcher smart enough to look deeper.

Do GNOME/KDE/(insert your favourite UNIX desktop environment here) 
automatically run 'file' to parse a file and try to rip out its 
metadata?  I'm aware that Nautilus can now recognise MP3 files and 
display some of its metadata in a window, but does this work for any 
files which don't have an MP3 extension?  Ditto for previews of 
JPGs/PNGs/TIFFs if they don't have the appropriate extension.  If it 
doesn't, then I hope you're lobbying to them about this :).

<p>
-- 
% Andre Pang : trust.in.love.to.save

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