[Vorbis] Extension proposal - partly serious

[noprivacy at earthlink.net]

<20040620190623.GF9120 at xiph.org>
Message-ID: <008301c4572e$256f4da0$67389c3f at computername>

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

> On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 11:59:24AM -0500, noprivacy at earthlink.net wrote:
> > Alright folks, here's the solution.
> >
> Here's another solution:
>
> Leave it alone, with .ogg representing anything in an Ogg container, and

No.  Because you people are screwing up.  In a *MAJOR* way.

> instead of conforming to some ancient industry standards or some insane
> concept that files should be sorted by CONTENT instead of TYPE.

We aren't "conforming".  We are wanting functionality.  I've been using
computers for more than 20 years.  I've seen a lot of changes.  Some were
good, some were bad.  A single extension definetly falls into the 'bad'
category.

The world doesn't work the way you want it.  It never will.

Your attitude reminds me of Microsoft's when they introduced XP.  "Where do
you want to go, today?"  Because XP was so inistent on doing things *its*
way rather than the user's way, people made a lot of jokes about "Where do
WE want you to go, today?"


> "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."

No automatic mime-type etc. is going to be able to reasonably do that kind
of sorting.

It's going to get some wrong.  (Which, if I remember right, was one of your
objections about file extension.  Because what would happen if the user
accidently put the wrong extension onto the file?)

> OggFile is where we are headed, and any application with OggFile support

Let's see.... how many programs are going to have OggFile support?

And how many OS's are going to have OggFile support?

And how many web sites are going to have OggFile support?

And how many ftp servers are going to have OggFile support?

And how many users are going to have OggFile support wired into their brain?

I'd say less than one percent.

People are just not going to be that interested in your idea.

Hey, they don't even bother examining .AVI files and telling you in advance
what codec it uses.  Or WMA / WMV files to say what version you'll need.

XP attempts to at least tell you some AVI properties, but even they screwed
up, making the situation worse than if they hadn't done it at all.


> 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.

You mean like.... Oh,.... a different file extension?

I guess that would also need to be done for all the web and ftp servers.
Since many of them just blindly lists files, there wont always be an
opportunity for it give a full description of what the file is.

> 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.

This isn't about illegal p2p.  The reality is that p2p is here to stay.  Not
one single p2p network has ever been declared as being illegal.  Some
content has, but not the network itself.

And there is a *lot* of 100% legal content on them.  Sure, I hear what the
RIAA and MPA etc. say.  But what they don't bother saying is that a massive
amount of stuff is legal.

And there may end up being a lot of theora video on there too (if Theora
actually works well enough.)  The idea of a good, open source video codec
that doesn't require royalties or such could be very attractive to a lot of
hobbiest video producers.  (And yes, to the porn sites that produce free
video clips.)

There are already gigs of ogg files available in the world.  In fact, the
guy was recently asking if anybody knew of a mirror for them.  Making them
available p2p would be a good idea.

There will be a lot of stuff available off a person's own computer.  Your
mime type isn't going to help in any of those situations.  Either it wont
work at all, or the site or application will have zero interest in
supporting your particular idea.