[Vorbis-dev] Cover art

[Mathias Kunter]

> arbitrary binary content is most likely not a valid UTF-8 sequence and may
> cause current software to fail.


> the UTF-8 encoding will add an overhead of 50%, while the Base64
> encoding adds an overhead of 33%. [...] as is the case with e.g. WinAmp, not only is the 
> BINARY_COVERART not shown in the file info dialog, but it's removed from 
> the file if other comments are edited with WinAmp.

> I thought the main objection to
> embedding PNG or JNG cover art directly was that some vorbis players
> reject muliplexed streams. That objection applies to copying the FLAC
> meta headers too.

So can we say that the best suggestion for including cover art within ogg vorbis files in terms of compatibility is to put the FLAC picture block as base64-encoded text comment into the file?

Those (hardware) players which don't support large comment headers probably also don't support multiplexed streams anyway. We can choose to either take care of those incompatible players and never include official cover art support within ogg vorbis, or to ignore this issue and move on with an official proposal for cover art.

Someone who owns an incompatible hardware player doesn't have to include cover art to his ogg files anyway (or can also remove already existing cover art with a tagger before copying the files to the hardware player). I don't think ogg vorbis should never support cover art just because some old hardware players don't support this.

Mathias