[Vorbis] Extension proposal - partly serious

[noprivacy at earthlink.net]

From: "Dan Hollis" <goemon at anime.net>

> OS shells are already slow enough without having to parse the container of
> every single file all the time. Please don't advocate making them slower.

Aint that the truth!

Even with a cache, it's still going to be error prone and slow.

As I've said before, I've done shell extensions for mp3 that would show the
bit rate in the icon for each file.

Neat toy, but it could get really slow when it had to work with a lot of
files.  That was a lot of disk I/O.

And it had problems with damaged files.  Just like XP does with its .AVI
extension handler.

And with Ogg files, it'll have to examine the entire file, not just the
header.  (That'll be fun when you put a data cd into your drive with a bunch
of ogg files.  It'll basically have to read the entire disk contents just to
decide what icon to use for each file.  I can just see it now.... your buddy
sends you a 4g dvd disk with 4,000 .ogg files.  It'll take 10 minutes
before the shell extension even gets done on a fast computer with a fast dvd
drive.)

And it'll have to be right 100% of the time.  So if you have an audio player
that can handle album art but not text song lyrics, but the handler thinks
your unknown player can do lyrics, the player is going to barf.  The user
wont really be in any position to be able to do anything about it.

K.I.S.S. should still be observed.

> Its still funny that you guys are demanding that all vendors capitulate to
> your demands rather than accomodating 'the way things work now'. You guys
> seem hell bent on making sure ogg will never be widely accepted.

I honestly don't think they remember just how big the internet is.

It's like they think they will just hand out this neat-o technology and that
the world will rush to it and demand changes to their OS just to support the
latest gee-whiz idea.

Just look how long Vorbis has been around.  It's taken a long time and a lot
of effort by a lot of people to even reach the point where 1/3rd of computer
users have even heard of Vorbis and even fewer even bother with it.

If Microsoft can't even force people to adopt a single extension for its
media format, much less actually convince them they want a single extension,
then why does Xiph think they can actually make people be eager for a single
file extension?


Maybe they really aren't all that interested in succeeding.  I know that
sounds odd, but maybe they are more interested in being remembered for being
'visionaries' or something.