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

[Hauke Duden]

> > 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.
> >
> Nor can filter audio/video without specifying all of `wma`, `mp3`,
> etc. versus `mpg`, `avi`, `wmv` etc.  Any good P2P searching program
> should provide preset lists of audio vs. video extensions, so you
> won't have to type them.  MIME types instead of extensions would solve
> most of this but this is not something we can or should fix.

All of these are different file formats, not codecs. Imagine if every .avi
codec had its own extension. You would have dozens of different ones and it
would be all but impossible to manage all of them and keep software
up-to-date.

When defining a standard it is very important to think about the future.
There may be only a handful of codecs right now, but what if .ogg becomes a
widespread file format? If every codec vendor creates its own file extension
you'd end up in a management hell. For one thing, applications would
constantly have to be updated to include the latest additions to the mix
(which is not really feasible). And simple searching on the hard disk would
be almost impossible if the search utility doesn't know all codecs.

It is bad enough having that many different file formats - if you lower the
abstraction level even further by using codec extensions it will get even
worse.

And besides: the shortcomings of others should not be used to justify one's
own shortcomings. Let's try to concentrate on improving things, not making
them worse!

Hauke

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