[Vorbis] .ogg extension and Theora

[Nescafe]

<20040617194522.GA17559 at xiph.org>
Message-ID: <000701c49cf0$95067910$a720a8c0 at NESCAFE>

> And who draws the line between "audio" and "audio+subtitles"?

The file extension.

>  What about "audio of a brand new codec which I cant decode"?
> What if your favorite media player only supports Vorbis, but you
> have a Ogg FLAC file which is supported by a media player which
> you like less, and want it to open in a media player which you
> most like?

The problem is not really about which player will manage to open your file.
It's about quickly identifying which one is audio, which one is video,
according on the oldest and simplest file-system metadata I heard about :
File extension.

> The problem cannot be solved in the extension.  Your OS is the problem,
> or prehaps just your file manager.  If you /want/ different icons and
> different programs to open files depending on the file's _content_, not
> just it's _type_, then you need something more advanced to fill this
niche.

Or just a simple hack which has worked for years and years. File extension
is simply a guess. Of course a JPG file can be named with a AVI extension,
but it's a first clue that is almost always enough.

It enables the use of simple file managers like Windows', and doesn't break
the more advanced ones. I see nothing against that.

> Ogg is the file format.  Wanting different extensions depending on it's
> content is like wanting different text file extensions depending on if
> the content is personal or work related, etc.

The birth of the OGM extension speaks for itself. There was a need, it was
filled. I just hope Xiph will officially support this *kind* of simple
tricks, if not *that* one.

M1V, MPG, M2V, MP1, MP2, MP3 do it well. Maybe these extensions aren't
self-explanatory enough, but they are quite enough for millions of people to
distinguish between audio, video and muxed.