[Vorbis] .ogg extension and Theora

[noprivacy at earthlink.net]

<20040617194522.GA17559 at xiph.org>
Message-ID: <004b01c454b0$a9704120$05649c3f at computername>

From: "Arc Riley" <arc at xiph.org>

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

Why does there need to be line drawn between those?  Seriously.... Why would
you need to get that bogged down into that much detail?

Most users are only going to care about easily and quickly telling the
difference between audio and video.  Both on their own system and when they
see it elsewhere, such as on the web or within a p2p program during a
search.

They are already accustomed to being able to do that by the extension with
mp3 vs. mpg, and wmv vs. wma.  And .ra vs. .rm.

Sure, knowing what codec etc. can be nice (unless you write the code buggy!
Like on XP), but generally, their first concern is knowing whether it's
audio or video.

Even if it's wrong 1 time in a hundred thousand (like finding a .mp3 as a
.wav) then that's not too bad.  That's still good enough for the web, and
good enough for most personal situations (because when you do find out, you
can fix it on your system and you wont have that problem with that rare file
again.)

> 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?

Those are valid problems.   And that's a normal problem with any generic
container format that can hold arbitrary codecs.

That's why people end up with third party file examiners.

Even having OS extensions added aren't going to help the cases where it's a
new format.

However, this is an *entirely* seperate problem than how the average user is
going to tell the difference between audio & video on a web site or such.

This is much more along the lines of Microsoft's attitude when they
programmed in the .AVI extension handler in WinXP.  And wrote it buggy, so
that now every WinXP user dreads getting a damaged avi file, and says some
very unprintable words when they do encounter them.  And after a while, it
eventually occurs to them to try and find a way to disable that 'feature'.


> 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.

That's starting to sound like a very small niche.

Simply differentiating between audio and video solves 99% of that.

Sure, if you want greater info, then an OS handler could do it.  And it
might even be nice to have.  But that's a seperate issue than helping users
tell the difference between audio & video.

I remember I once played around with an extension for Win9x that could show
in the icon what bit rate the mp3 was.  It was kinda fun for a while, until
I started having too many problems with it and the file listings took too
long because it opened each and every file and examined it.  Then I removed
it.