[vorbis] The OGG Extension...

[Doc Holiday]

Me again...  :)
Despite all of the comments made in favor of the .OGG extension, I'm still going to have to side with the "different extension" camp. There are a number of reasons for this... 

First off... from where I'm sitting, it doesn't matter how much of a grey-area you get into, I can't think of a single scenario where you wouldn't be able to say that it was primarily one or the other. Let's consider Monty's slide show... this would probably take the Audio/Video extension... why? because BOTH aspects are seemingly critical data elements. OTOH, the song with the one frame of CD Cover Art would definately take the Audio extension. If someone HAD the "official" Ogg player, it could be set to open both of the above and handle them both appropriately, regardless of extension.

As for the launcher... an undoubtedly neat idea, but it seems more like a novelty than something that would actually work well. (a la M$'s "Briefcase" that came with Win 3.1 and 95) The main problem I see here is implementation. How are we going to get this launcher onto the client machines? Are we going to "require" WinAmp to distribute the Ogg Launcher? is it going to come bundled with the WinAmp Plug-in? Are we going to say... "Well, if you want ogg to work, you need to download another program". On top of distribution problems, this would probably require the average user to RTFM... and how many of them want to do that?  While the launcher would be a neat tool for a Windows "power user" the average flip-the-computer-on-and-play-music user isn't going to like it.

The only other point that stands on it's own is the fact that OGG is the format for all of the specifications. Nevertheless, that doesn't make it easy on the user. We shouldn't expect every Audio player to handle (or intentionally ignore) video, and we shouldn't expect every video player to know what to do when it encounters a "sound only" type of file. We also need to keep in mind that, if this spec catches on, we'll probably get some third-party developers working on stuff independently of this group.

I would have NO problem with a compromise (say .ogg.vorbis or .ogg-vorbis or .vogg or .v-ogg or whatever) but we do need to cater to Windows here. Linux is a good enough operating system that it can adapt to anything that works in Windows. Let's make sure that our weakest OS link is strong enough that it doesn't kill us. (Especially because it happens to be the most popular one). Besides, I still haven't seen a functionality argument in favor of .OGG... they've all, basically, been aesthetic or philosophical.

...then again, I could be wrong. :)

~doc

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