[ogg-dev] Re: [theora-dev] Re: [Advocacy] Re: [Vorbis-dev] Proposal: An extension to rules all others

[Daniel Holth]

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Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> Have you tried mobile and embedded platforms?
>
> Cheers,
> Silvia.
>
> On 5/4/07, Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves <justivo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I don't know what's the situation right now, but I have run a few
>> tests and I changed my opinion (again) on using .3 extensions.
>>
>> I've tried old file systems like FAT16, FAT32, Joliet, Rock Ridge,
>> ext2 and ISO9660 and created a "longfilename.oggaudio" file.  Then I
>> checked how it looked in both Windows XP and an Ubuntu system.  Every
>> file system coped well with the file, and both OS's even let me open
>> it in an audio player with no noticeable problems.
>>
>> The only issue I found was with older versions of ISO9660,
>> specifically version 1, which only allows 8.3 UPPERCASE files.
>> Presently, I know of no use to ISO9660 version 1.
>>
>> My vote goes back to:
>> .oggaudio
>> .oggvideo
>> and .ogg for 1) everything else and 2) backwards compatibility
>>
>> By backwards compatibility I mean old players that can only read
>> Vorbis as .ogg (or Speex as .spx) _and_ backwards compatibility with
>> arcane file systems, i.e. MS-DOS and ISO9660 version 1.
>>
>> I'll remind everyone that on the Monthly Meeting of October 2006,
>> everyone there reached a consensus that we should avoid at all costs
>> the use of extensions of three letters.
>>
>> -Ivo
So far, this community has refused to believe that fetching three
bytes at the end of every file in a directory (all at once) is better
than fetching the first kilobyte of each file (across the network, one
TCP connection at a time), then parsing it with codec-specific
methods, just to determine whether it's audio or video so that we can
know whether to copy it to a device that doesn't have a screen or
transcode it into xvid or H.264 so we can view them on devices that do
have screens.

Basically the message is "we want you to love freedom (and re-write
all your file managers)".

Now, finally, the community is making a thrust towards a practical
reality that is very uncomfortable for a certain breed of design
purists: it is a convenient and widely accepted convention that video
and audio files should have a different three-letter extension, so
that users have a good chance of distinguishing between them without
any special tools at all. And what's better than a three letter
extension? This proposal is three times better! No patents, and
obnoxiously different than the competition.

I suggest that the file extension is a very poor place to put
innovative features. I would appreciate it if a leader would come up
with the most boring, most conventional solution possible, while
everyone else wrote codecs or something.

- - Daniel Holth
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