[Vorbis] .ogg extension and Theora

[noprivacy at earthlink.net]

<40D45536.7020504 at sympatico.ca>
Message-ID: <002201c4563f$747a3170$84389c3f at computername>

From: "Jon Doda" <jdoda at sympatico.ca>

> > Nearly everybody here is agreeing that it needs to be done.  And are
> > saying that .ogv is okay.  (Over the already existing .ogm)
>
> Actually, the .oga extension is arguably more important than the .ogv
> extension.  .ogg is always going to be the generic extension for media

Generic *only* for Xiph.

For everybody else, .ogg means audio.  In the applications they use and in
their minds, .ogg means audio.  That's pretty much the reason .ogm was done
by other people.  Because they realized that .ogg was already percieved as
being just audio.

The people in this mailing list know better.  But all those people who hear
about Vorbis from some article they read, or from some listening test where
Vobis beat AAC, or the .ogg files they see on the p2p networks, the
extension .ogg means audio.  And not even any audio such as Speex or Flac or
whatever, but Vorbis audio.

That's Xiph's fault (and take your pick on the reasons), but it's a little
late to easily fix it.

It could be done.  But I'm not so sure it'd be a good idea to try.  It might
cause more trouble than it'd be worth.  Changing the minds of 100 million
computer users world-wide isn't trivial.

You'd have to talk with the p2p makers about notifying them to add the extra
extension.  And convince them it's needed rather than arbitrary.  Then you'd
have to talk the tools makers and encoders into adding it as the default
extension.  And you'd need some sort of 'publicity' campaign to try and
inform users (and magazines and web sites) of the change, and convenince
them that this isn't an arbitrary change.  And explain to them why you are
waiting until now to do this instead of years ago when it was first
discussed.  (I'd like to hear Xiph make that explanation and confession!!)

You could try and just slip the change into the encoders as .oga being the
default extension, but then that'd create confusion in user's minds.  Is
that a new format?  What happened to Vorbis?  Etc.

I agree, if it had been done in the beginning, that'd be best.  But it
wasn't, and I'm not sure it'd be a good idea to even try and change that
now.

It could be done.  But it'd take a lot of extra work and effort, and I'm
just not sure it's worth it.  If you want to give a good explanation as to
how to easily do that, with a minimum amount of confusion, then I'm
listening.

I think the only thing we can realisticly try to change is something that
hasn't been done yet... Namely the extension for Video.

> really video and not anything weird".  That being said, I think having
> both .oga and .ogv is a good idea, in order to not implicitly change the
> meaning of the .ogg extension, which must remain generic and ambiguous
> as to its contents.

I'm not entirely oposed to the idea of having two new extensions.  I'm
really not.

I'm just not so sure it would be worth the effort to try and change the
meaning of .OGG from "Vorbis audio only" (in users mind) to a "hold
anything" and .oga being "audio only" instead.


We could create a new generic extension....  Call it ".xiph"  Or perhaps
".snafu"   [Grin]