AW: AW: [vorbis] Why the commotion about file extensions?

[Hauke Duden]

> All true.  But note what the user wants according to these definition:
> he wants different icons for audio vs. video.  Yes, he doesn't know
> the difference between `.mp3` and `.ogg`.  But that's precisely why
> windows hides the extensions from him by default.  If he does know, he
> would have disabled this hiding.

Exactly. The main reason for different extensions from my point of view is
to make different icons possible.

> > .ogg should probably be kept for audio, since it is already 
> pretty well
> > known. So one could use .oggv or .ogv or something like 
> that for video files
> > (theora, tarkin, and whatever else will come). In my 
> opinion, that would be
> > the reasonable thing to do.
> >
> Perhaps.  That would be the minimal distinction to satify users.
> However, some users (like me) do care for various codecs.  And they
> would like different extensions for Ogg vs. Flac vs. Speex and Theora
> vs. Tarkin.  And (for windows users) different icons (perhaps only
> slightly, e.g. color difference).

That might be true. However, the main problem I see with this is that by
using only the codecs as the extension you make it impossible to filter for
audio/video without knowing all the codecs. You cannot easily do file
searches without specifying all those extensions either.

Maybe one can combine these ideas and allow (optional) specification of the
codec in addition to a primary extension?

Something like foobar.theora.oggv or foobar-theora.oggv ? This is what is
already done with many divx .avi files (foobar-divx.avi) on P2P file sharing
networks. I'm pretty sure that some people/encoding utilities will create
such files anyway, so it might be a good idea to define the way to do it now
to achieve some consistency.

The main drawback with such an arrangement is that Windows will not hide the
secondary extension. This is why I think it should be optional. That way the
"average" user is not bothered with the technology and the "above average"
user could easily invoke a utility that renames files according to their
codec and inserts the secondary extension (if it isn't already there).

Hauke
--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.