[Vorbis] Middle ground? (was Re: "HAANCOSTFU?")

[John Morton]

<20040621085550.GD18554 at xiph.org>
<20040621133442.GB15203 at nowster.zetnet.co.uk>
Message-ID: <200406220203.04042.jwm at eslnz.co.nz>

On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 01:34, Paul Martin wrote:
>  On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 04:55:50AM -0400, Monty wrote:
>  > You're all right, but you're only right in your own minds.  You're all
>  > wrong, but only because you insist everyone else think like you do.
>
>  Can you please suggest a middle ground, then?
>
>  .ogg and application/ogg are set in stone. However, they don't map to
>  real-world usage too well. (Viz. the need to read the whole stream to
>  work out what it contains.)

That's not necessarily the case. Consider that:

1) ogg is one of the few, if only, container formats that is intended to
carry both audio only streams and video, so not a lot of people know about
the feature,

2) Until the great media player convergence event occurs, most people will
consider that audio only and video ought to be separate media in separate
files,

3) Seekable files containing more than one logical stream are fairly rare in
the wild.

Therefore, it would be quite reasonable to have the mime-magic handler for ogg
containers just scan for the first n bytes, read the particulars of the first
file from the first logical stream found and assume the rest is the same
'type'. It won't do the right thing for mixed audio/video streams, but you
can assume such creatures are created for testing, or by the willfully
perverse.

Sometime down the road, when media players work well with both audio and
video, it won't matter, as they'll scan the particulars of the whole file
into their media browser database, keeping the results cached until the next
time the file changes.

Having to write and maintain launch helper apps will still suck, but if the
IANA are going to be hardarse about there being only one type set to the
container, then I guess that's what needs to be done.

John