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

[Beni Cherniavsky]

Hauke Duden wrote on 2003-07-17:

> > 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.
>
> > 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.
>
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.

To sum up, I don't see any reason not to use separate extensions for
each codec.


-- 
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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