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

[Beni Cherniavsky]

Hauke Duden wrote on 2003-07-17:

> > > 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.
>
Good point.  File extensions normally represent groups of related
formats.  I don't propose differentiating everything (e.g. standalone
FLAC from Ogg FLAC).  I do want as a minimum to tell apart these
categories:

- Lossy audio: Vorbis, Speex.  But speech is useful to distinguish
  from music, so making Speex separate is not a bad idea.
- Lossless audio: FLAC, WAV (not that we can change the later ;).
- Video: Theora, Tarkin.

> 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!
>
Right - but you are trying to imporve it for the user who has trouble
remembering codecs, while harming me <wink>.  As a person who is going
to use Xiph (or other open) formats as much as possible, I don't care
for many formats average users do, and I can easily remember all Xiph
codecs ;-).


-- 
Beni Cherniavsky <cben at tx.technion.ac.il>

If I don't hack on it, who will?  And if I don't GPL it, what am I?
And if it itches, why not now?  [With apologies to Hilel ;]
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