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

[André Pang]

On 02/06/2004, at 1:11 PM, John Morton wrote:

> In theory, Oggfile will make that problem go away by being able to 
> hand off
> whatever is contained inside the ogg to the right codec to handle. The 
> ogg
> extension should become no more inconvenient than .mov or .avi.

Note that both the extensions given to .mov and .avi imply that they're 
movie formats, which is not the case if you overload .ogg to mean 
either audio or video, so your argument breaks down there.

Sure, you can give an .ogg file to a DirectShow-based media player 
right now, and it'll happily play video and audio (and doesn't care 
about what file extension it has).  But that's not the point: the point 
is that users expect a .mov or .avi to have video in them.  I've worked 
with plenty of people who've opened up .mov files in QuickTime player 
and then become puzzled when they discover there's only an audio track. 
  This discussion is an issue of user experience ("principle of least 
surprise" and all that); not a technical one.

.ogg is already associated with audio even though it can handle video, 
and it's confusing enough people that people who use OGM sometimes use 
.ogm extensions merely to indicate that they contain video.  LIke Zen, 
Kenji, and Lourens, I'd suggest the use of a different extension for 
Ogg files which contain video.  For people who don't care about file 
extensions (those who are quite happy with using 'file' to identify 
what type of file it is), there's nothing to lose: just throw the file 
at your all-in-one media player.  For people who do care about file 
extensions, this makes a world of difference.

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

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