[Vorbis] Extension proposal - partly serious

[Tom Felker]

<20040620190623.GF9120 at xiph.org>
Message-ID: <200406201803.27968.tcfelker at mtco.com>

On Sunday 20 June 2004 2:06 pm, Arc Riley wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 11:59:24AM -0500, noprivacy at earthlink.net wrote:
> > Alright folks, here's the solution.
> >
> > 1)  Keep extensions to 3 letters for audio & video.  Except for special
> > situations where the user might be doing a codec specific name.  Since
> > the official extensions are 3 letters, those can always be used on any
> > 8.3 device.
>
> Here's another solution:
>
> Leave it alone, with .ogg representing anything in an Ogg container, and
> instead of conforming to some ancient industry standards or some insane
> concept that files should be sorted by CONTENT instead of TYPE.

Audio and video are different types of thing.  The fact that the Ogg container
format even exists is irrelevant to anyone but programmers.  Labelling a box
of DVDs "packing peanuts" because that's what's immediately inside is stupid
- you should label it with the type of the deepest-nested contents, the
contents you care about - "DVDs."

> It's called mime-type for a reason.  Ogg is a type of file.  It contains
> data, whatever that data may be.  Creating different extensions and
> mime-types depending on the content is similar, as I've said before, to
> creating different text file extensions depending on the content of the
> text file;
>
> "Hmm, I want my personal text files to immediatly appear different from
> work-related text files, documents about my child's school should be a
> different extension, and so on.  And to make sure that people I send
> these files to understand what they are, this needs to be a standard."

But unlike audio and video, personal and work-related text files are the same
type of media - text, and most importantly, you open them with the same
program - a text editor.

> OggFile is where we are headed, and any application with OggFile support
> will be able to play any form of media.  It thus doesn't care if it's
> audio, video, or something completely different.

Interesting, but won't there still be audio-only players?  I can't picture Sox
doing video anytime soon.

> If you need to have your audio-only files seperated from video files
> keep them in seperate directories and/or put something in their name
> which clearly makes them different.  The latter also takes care of the
> P2P problem which, btw, is not Xiph's problem as illegal P2P is neither
> part of our plan nor even interests us in the least.

In other words, you want all the users to work it out individually.  OK, when
I get a significant amount of non-Vorbis Ogg files, I'll probably rename my
files .vorbis, etc., or maybe .vorbis.ogg, etc.  Now, since I'm not in
control of oggenc and I don't share my files, this won't have any affect on
anybody but me.

Whoever does control the encoders is apparently not likely to change their
mind.  The only other people with the power to change other's behavior are
those who share their files - the copyright infringers you ignore.  So a
standard will emerge, and probably not a very good one - .oggvideo, .oggv,
[Theora].ogg, or even .ogg______________.exe.

And for the honest people who encode their own files, the Ogg formats will be
a hassle.  Audio and video viewers will fight over which is associated
with .ogg, forcing users to right-click... Open With... every time, and the
icons will be the same.  Or they could download some switcher program, so
each file open takes a little longer, they get nice icons after a short
delay, and it works almost as well as it would have with multiple extensions,
at least until the video players steal the association again.


BTW, I just discovered a very relevant oggenc bug which can cause data loss:

$ flac --ogg foo.wav
...
$ ls
foo.ogg
foo.wav
$ oggenc foo.ogg
Opening with ogg module: Ogg FLAC file reader
Encoding "foo.ogg" to
"foo.ogg"
at quality 3.00

...and oggenc hangs, and truncates the file!  What would be the proper
response here?  Should I have to specify an output file?  What if I was doing
a bunch of files?  Should I have to specify an output directory (oggenc can't
do this yet)?  Must I make a script?  See how much easier separate extensions
would make things?

Have fun,
--
Tom Felker, <tcfelker at mtco.com>
<http://vlevel.sourceforge.net> - Stop fiddling with the volume knob.

Hack user friendliness onto a pure and simple system, because
you can't hack purity and simplicity onto a user friendly system.