[Vorbis] Extension proposal - partly serious

[John Morton]

<20040620190623.GF9120 at xiph.org>
Message-ID: <200406211332.17596.jwm at eslnz.co.nz>

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 07:06, 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.

The funny old thing about the notion of a file type is that it tends to be
related to things what you use the data in the file for, or what sort of
program you need to make the file do something useful.

>  It's called mime-type for a reason.  Ogg is a type of file.  It contains
>  data, whatever that data may be.

It contains *multimedia* data. That's important. By definition, all files
contain some sort of data (except the empty ones), so giving it an extension
to tell you it's a file is redundant. The problem is that 'multimedia' is
still a bit broad for most user's needs.

>  Creating different extensions and  mime-types

Hang on. Are you suggesting that there be only one mime-type for all files
that are ogg containers?

>  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;

But we do. My text files aren't all called .txt - quite a few of the
are .py, .c, .h and so on. I certainly don't name them after the container
type; I've got no files with extensions like .7bit-ascii or .utf8. That would
be daft.

>  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.

It's all about the user interface as far as the end user is concerned. Right
now the apps that do a good job of managing large amounts of music and aid in
generating playlists are pretty crap at handling video in all it's forms, if
they do so at all. Meanwhile, the good video players support subtitles,
multiple audio streams, full screen display, dvd menus and so on, but
generally have crappy playlists and no metadata support, so they suck for
plain audio.

>  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.

That doesn't help the operating system decide what is the right thing to do
when I click on one in a file browser, or in a web browser. It can't tell
whether it should run the app-that's-good-at-video or the
app-that's-good-at-audio with just a .ogg for everything, or
application/x-ogg. So you need some helper app to parse the file and call the
right program, but as that's not part of the way the browser does things
normally, you have to associate ogg with the helper app, then, inside the
helper app, associate video with one app and audio with another.

How is this making the user's life easier?

John