[Vorbis-dev] base64 ALBUMART vorbiscomment (was Re: [ogg-dev] Ogg/Spots and Ogg/MNG)

[xiphmont at xiph.org]

One implication of 'human readable' is that it has always been
considered acceptable behavior for an application to simply present
all the tags as text for the user's edification.  Nothing currently
deployed, including a whole bunch of hardware players that cannot be
updated, expects huge chunks of binary data to be there.

That's not even getting into the royal pain of being *required* to
parse and cache all this extra data becasue it appears in a required
header.  It substantially increases the minimum buffering requirements
for the file and will cause memory constrained implementations to have
to choose between not being able to play some files or opting to
ignore tags altogether.

Arbitrary art belongs in a seperate stream.  Nothing supports that
right now, but nothing supports album art in a vorbis tag either.

Monty