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

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

Hi Daniel,

On 5/4/07, Daniel Holth <dholth at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> 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.

Pardon me if I don't follow your argument. Are you arguing for or
against a 3 letter extension? Which proposal are you referring to with
"this proposal"?

Regards,
Silvia.