[Vorbis] Extension proposal - partly serious

[John Morton]

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 04:59, 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.

Yep.

>  2) introduce a new extension .OGV for ogg container video.  With a strong
>  preference for Xiph only codecs.  (If you want 3rd party codecs, there's
>  always .OGM which currently uses Divx.)  This can handle anything that
> would be encountered with an audio or video stream.  (Which means,
> realistically, that it's totally generic.  But the extension is for user
> convenience.) (Since Theora is the only video codec for the next several
> years, see suggestion #7 below.)

Yes, but users don't care what particular encodings are in it, just as long as
they have a means of keeping video and audio separate in the absence of mime
type support in the file system, and all the file transfer protocols used to
move media about the place. It's a kludge, basically, but a necessary one.

>  3) introduce a new .oga extension for audio, that can handle anything
> audio related.

Nah, the horses have already bolted. Continue to allow people to presume
that .ogg means audio only. Another extension isn't going to do anything
especially useful, here.

>  4) any DRM protected ogg file (generic or otherwise) use the extension
> .ogp (or some such.)

I rather doubt Xiph will ever be in the business of creating DRM schemes, as
it runs somewhat contrary to the whole open and free thing. And it's a mugs
game, anyway. Let whoever writes one make that call.

>  5) abandon ".ogg"  It's been accepted as being Vorbis audio only.

The genie is already out of the bottle.

>  6) Create a new generic extension.  ".XIPH" or ".SNAFU"

In the magical land where 8.3 doesn't matter and we all use mime types,
extensions don't matter - so who cares?

>  7) Many codecs already have their own extension.

Users don't care about codecs any more than they care about operating systems
- they care about applications. We need a separate extension for video
because, right now, the applications that are good at video playback -
supporting subtitles, different language channels, dvd menus and so on - are
different from the ones that are good audio players - supporting metadata
based music browsers, query based playlist generation, and good playlist
manipulation tools. Audio and video playback is converging, but it will take
another couple of years for it to pass the 80/80 acceptance mark.

We need a file extension kludge, in the meantime, because the time it will
take for the file systems and transfer protocols of the desktop world to
migrate to using mime types is on the order of 5 to 10 years.

John