[Vorbis] brainfart #67453 - hyper-index

[Haxe]

<200407261514.42528.haxe at pansensack.de>
<200407270253.58473.jwm at eslnz.co.nz>
Message-ID: <200407261847.42274.haxe at pansensack.de>

On Monday 26 July 2004 16:53, John Morton wrote:
>  - How is one big file and a pregenerated index better than several
> small files? After all, the "pregenerated index" is exactly what the
> file system is doing, and existing players all know how to ask the
> file system where each file begins right now, where as you'd have to
> train them to use some separate index system.

Of course. I love filesystems, and in most cases a filesystem serves
much better than an index within the file.

But when you want to share something that consists of several tracks, it
is often desirable to have it all in one file to ensure it's integrity.
Of course you can put all track files in one zip file (I have sometimes
seen this for albums), but then you need a player that understands to
directly play the contents of a zip file if you don't want to manually
unpack it all.

So for this purpose, it would be better to have a track index in a big
ogg file. Players that understand this index can show the tracks
correctly, and players that don't understand the index can at least
play the entire file as one track. In this sense, introducing an
indexing technique would be backwards compatible and thus much better
than just putting all tracks in one zip file.

greetz,
Hauke Hachmann