[vorbis-dev] embedding a lot of vorbis comments

[Scott Wheeler]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Tuesday 11 May 2004 19:27, Daniel Holth wrote:

> 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.

So by 'right way' you mean 'wrong way, but it might work'.  ;-)

> 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.

I was with you so far as the "Here's a terrible idea I had".  ;-)  [reaches 
for the bad-evil-wrong stick]

In the longrun it hurts a standard if you make assumptions based on a single 
implementation rather than on the standard itself.  Specifically TagLib 
"trusts" the length as listed rather than looking for null characters.

> 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!

Nor do any of the KDE based players.  And actually Muine and MusicCube are 
both switching over to TagLib at the moment too.

- -Scott

- -- 
The three chief virtues of a programmer are: laziness, impatience and hubris.
- --Larry Wall
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFAom2yQu0ByfY5QTkRAmaDAJ9wm86BHusggc38fHqqpszx5614NACffhd1
rUejsTrSD3/oy7T5qUmPgsY=
=2iso
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-dev-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.