[Vorbis] brainfart #67453 - hyper-index

[Paul Ellis]

<200407261847.42274.haxe at pansensack.de>
Message-ID: <4105533F.8000509 at ellisfoundation.com>


Haxe wrote:

>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.
>
I think this feature of having one file recognized as multiple
tracks/chapters would be very nice for Vorbis, but absolutely necessary
for Theora.  If you tried to watch the Full Length movie "Honey" (I
think that's what it was called) in Theora when the bitstream freeze was
announced, I'd think many would agree.  For short clips, it's not
necessary.  However, for long movies/videos it is very important and
most players don't mix multiple video files together as one smooth
presentation well at all.  Also think of seeking on streamed content,
wouldn't it just be great to hit next chapter instead of trying to find
where the next part starts?

Paul Ellis