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

[John Morton]

On Wed, 02 Jun 2004 17:33, André Pang wrote:
>  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.

So do quite a few unix based apps. 

>  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.

That's a far from perfect world. Determining the file type should be as cheap 
an action as possible, as it will the the sort of thing you want to do over 
directories of files.  'file' guesses, sometimes wrongly, and may need to 
read a lot of the file each time to make that guess. For some data, a guess 
may not be possible (ie raw PCM). 

A better solution is to avoid guessing and stop overloading the file name by 
including the file type in the file's metadata. BeOS did this using 
mimetypes. 

>  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.

We're stuck with them everywhere. 

I think you're probably right for the present; people are going to want to 
distinguish between audio and video. In the longer term, that probably won't 
matter that much as all media players are converging to be able to play 
everything. 

John
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