[vorbis-dev] embedding a lot of vorbis comments

[Daniel Holth]

Christoph Rupp wrote:

> i know that it's a hack, and that players won't work unless i write my 
> own player. I would prefer to add a second, logical stream for my meta 
> information instead of abusing vorbis comments. but i'm not a guru 
> programmer and i have to admit that i have big troubles to understand 
> how to generate packets and write them to ogg pages... at least i 
> figured out how to change vorbis comments (thanks to the vorbiscomment 
> sources, but otherwise i would have been lost). 

The 'right way' as far as I am concerned is to abuse the vorbis 
comments. The format can store kilobytes of 8-bit clean data in the 
comments if you like.

Here's a terrible idea I had: store any really special data after a NULL 
byte in a comment, then write a special comment extractor that can get 
at it - if your data is special enough that a human wouldn't want to 
read it. All current players will stop at the NULL byte because the 
vorbis library looks for it, UTF-8 yada yada.

This idea is so horrible! It abuses the Vorbis comments! The docs say 
"don't use them for anything that a human wouldn't want to read, insert 
XML!" in the fine tradition of OGG saying "this is the right and 
beautiful way to do something (by the way, it's not implemented or 
supported.)" What, I won't have to rewrite all current ogg players 
(except for probably videolan, mplayer and xine - they don't use 
vorbisfile)? I am unclean!

Depending, of course, on whethery your metadata is very big.

- Daniel Holth
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