Vorbis - Jun 2004 - Extension proposal - partly serious

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.

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.)

And maybe....

3) introduce a new .oga extension for audio, that can handle anything audio
related.  Such as text for song lyrics, or pictures for album art.  No video
though.  With most vorbis decoders being just audio, the .oga could be seen
as an extension, with extra audio friendly abilities.  You could do song
lyrics, multiple pictures (album art), multi-channel sound (for those
surround sound experiences), and so on.  It also has the requirement that
anything the decoder can't understand, it ignores.  That future proofs the
decoders, and allows existing decoders and players to keep working with just
an additional extension.  (Actually, this might be a good thing when
Vorbis-2 comes along, since that would require decoder changes etc. anyway.)

4) any DRM protected ogg file (generic or otherwise) use the extension .ogp
(or some such.)  This just to remind users that it is DRM'ed and not open.
Just like how iTunes does .mp4 and .m4a and .m4p (or whatever it is.  I'm
not an iTunes user.)  Or you could just add "-DRM" to the extension. 
Make
it ".ogv-drm" and ".oga-drm"  Any player that can do
drm'ed ogg can just be
forced to also deal with the longer extension.  Since there aren't likely to
many DRM'ed files, this isn't really a problem.

Now for some odd-ball not entirely serious suggestions.....

5) abandon ".ogg"  It's been accepted as being Vorbis audio only. 
With no
ability to handle anything else.  (Think of the situation with ".AAC".
It's
a raw audio format.  But in the m4a container, you can add song lyrics,
pictures, etc. etc.)  We are achieving the appearance of that by going from
.ogg to .oga

6) Create a new generic extension.  ".XIPH" or ".SNAFU"  
[grin]  Since most
users wont ever need to use a generic container on a ISO 8.3 cd, you don't
have to worry about truncated filenames and extensions.  Any player would be
using .oga or .ogv or the older .ogg vorbis audio.

7) Many codecs already have their own extension.  .FLAC, speex (?) and so
on.  And, of course, .mp2, .mp3, .mpc, mpg, etc.  You could also make
unofficial (tolerated but not strongly encouraged) extensions for specific
Xiph codecs.  Such as ".theora"  Not really any great need, but it
might
help reduce "hunt the codec" problems that so many p2p users have when
dealing with the .avi container.  You still have 8.3 problems with strict
ISO cd's, but the user could always rename that to .ogv or .oga if that ever
becomes a problem.

On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 11:59:24AM -0500, noprivacy@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.

It's called mime-type for a reason.  Ogg is a type of file.  It contains
data, whatever that data may be.  Creating different extensions and
mime-types 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;

"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."

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.

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.  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.

... just another personal contribution to the EFEF

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004, Patrick Mauritz wrote:
> so, with these options your favorite shell can now provide dimensions of
the
> video, lyrics, information about all languages that are available in this
video,
> cd covers, etc etc that it can't provide with extensions - a unified
extension
> (how about ".ogg"?) actually helps deciding if this shell
extension should kick in
> or not, at least on mime-impaired systems.
ls?

oh i see, you want change everyones ls so it parses ogg containers. good
luck.

-Dan

<20040620190623.GF9120@xiph.org>
Message-ID: <200406201803.27968.tcfelker@mtco.com>

On Sunday 20 June 2004 2:06 pm, Arc Riley wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 11:59:24AM -0500, noprivacy@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.
Audio and video are different types of thing.  The fact that the Ogg container
format even exists is irrelevant to anyone but programmers.  Labelling a box
of DVDs "packing peanuts" because that's what's immediately
inside is stupid
- you should label it with the type of the deepest-nested contents, the
contents you care about - "DVDs."
> It's called mime-type for a reason.  Ogg is a type of file.  It
contains
> data, whatever that data may be.  Creating different extensions and
> mime-types 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;
>
> "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."
But unlike audio and video, personal and work-related text files are the same
type of media - text, and most importantly, you open them with the same
program - a text editor.
> 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.
Interesting, but won't there still be audio-only players?  I can't
picture Sox
doing video anytime soon.
> 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.  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.
In other words, you want all the users to work it out individually.  OK, when
I get a significant amount of non-Vorbis Ogg files, I'll probably rename my
files .vorbis, etc., or maybe .vorbis.ogg, etc.  Now, since I'm not in
control of oggenc and I don't share my files, this won't have any affect
on
anybody but me.

Whoever does control the encoders is apparently not likely to change their
mind.  The only other people with the power to change other's behavior are
those who share their files - the copyright infringers you ignore.  So a
standard will emerge, and probably not a very good one - .oggvideo, .oggv,
[Theora].ogg, or even .ogg______________.exe.

And for the honest people who encode their own files, the Ogg formats will be
a hassle.  Audio and video viewers will fight over which is associated
with .ogg, forcing users to right-click... Open With... every time, and the
icons will be the same.  Or they could download some switcher program, so
each file open takes a little longer, they get nice icons after a short
delay, and it works almost as well as it would have with multiple extensions,
at least until the video players steal the association again.


BTW, I just discovered a very relevant oggenc bug which can cause data loss:

$ flac --ogg foo.wav
...
$ ls
foo.ogg
foo.wav
$ oggenc foo.ogg
Opening with ogg module: Ogg FLAC file reader
Encoding "foo.ogg" to
"foo.ogg"
at quality 3.00

...and oggenc hangs, and truncates the file!  What would be the proper
response here?  Should I have to specify an output file?  What if I was doing
a bunch of files?  Should I have to specify an output directory (oggenc
can't
do this yet)?  Must I make a script?  See how much easier separate extensions
would make things?

Have fun,
--
Tom Felker, <tcfelker@mtco.com>
<http://vlevel.sourceforge.net> - Stop fiddling with the volume knob.

Hack user friendliness onto a pure and simple system, because
you can't hack purity and simplicity onto a user friendly system.

<20040620190623.GF9120@xiph.org>
Message-ID: <20040620233409.GA11753@nowster.zetnet.co.uk>

On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 12:06:23PM -0700, Arc Riley wrote:
> 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.
.ogg for purists, .ogv and .oga for realists.

Ogg is a container format, just like *IFF. Should all WAV and AVI files
be renamed .RIFF for consistency?

By the way, citing the Mac harms your case. The "extension" part of a
Mac file is the four character creator-ID stored in the resource fork,
a standard mandated by the operating system, and directly equivalent to
the 3 character extension given to DOS files. This four character
creator-id indicates to the Finder which icon should displayed for that
file, and which program should be used to open it.

--
Paul Martin <pm@zetnet.net> (work)
<pm@nowster.zetnet.co.uk> (home)

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

From: "Arc Riley" <arc@xiph.org>
> On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 11:59:24AM -0500, noprivacy@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.

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 04:59, noprivacy@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

From: "Graham Mitchell" <graham@grahammitchell.com>
> Arguing things out in a mailing list until some sort of
"consensus" is
formed
> is pretty useless, IMO, since no one is bound to anything.

It's the only place that is open enough to discuss things like this.

Otherwise you end up with a couple people making the decision in some bar
somewhere, half bombed out of their head by some stale beer.

And no, there is no way to *force* them to do anything.  Regardless of
whether it's an open mailing list, or a semi-open IRC, or a private meeting
in a bar.
> You name your files how you like, and I'll name mine.  Ditto for tags,
which
> is another perennial flamewar on this list.
Why should you *have* to rename yours the way you want it?  Shouldn't it
already be in a decent form to begin with?
> [I can't believe I'm still reading this discussion and haven't
killfiled
it
> myself a long time ago; because it's difficult to fathom how little I
care
> about the outcome of all this.  Further still to imagine why I'm
> contributing.]
Sounds you just prefer to be told what to end up with.  To sit back and wait
until it's over with and then complain that they didn't do it that made
sense.

> because it's difficult to fathom how little I care about the outcome of
all this.

Like Monte Walsh said: "You aint got no idea how little I care."

<200406211225.12246.jwm@eslnz.co.nz>
Message-ID: <008d01c4572e$2970b1a0$67389c3f@computername>

From: "John Morton" <jwm@eslnz.co.nz>
> >  2) introduce a new extension .OGV for ogg container video.  With a
strong
>
> Yes, but users don't care what particular encodings are in it, just as
long as

They don't care about the encodings, but they do care about having trouble
finding the right codec to use to play it.

There are dozens of audio & video codecs used in .AVI files, and it can be
very annoying to spend an hour or so on the web hunting for the right codec.
It's bad enough there are a number of warez codec packs that users are
encouraged to install.  You got no idea what you are actually installing
with those things, but it's the best solution to "hunt the codec"
problem.

Sure, today new stuff is done in Divx, but older stuff, or stuff done by
individuals (funny live tv bloopers, funny home videos, etc.) can be done in
no telling what codec.  And not all codecs are even available anymore.

I was just trying to keep things a bit simple for the end users.  By
encouraging the video format to only do Xiph codecs, users would only need
to go one place to get the codecs.

By allowing (but not encouraging) longer codec specific extensions, other
users could be kept happy.

> >  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 has been my strong opinion too.  But several people have suggested it.
There are some potential benefits, but....  [shrug]
> >  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

They do have DRM available.  It's very doubtful anybody will ever use it,
but it is available.  I just added this to be complete.

> 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.
I don't see it ever completely merging.  I want very different things in an
audio player.

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

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 07:06, Arc Riley wrote:
>  On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 11:59:24AM -0500, noprivacy@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

<20040620190623.GF9120@xiph.org>
<200406201803.27968.tcfelker@mtco.com>
Message-ID: <200406211205.07423.msmith@xiph.org>

On Monday 21 June 2004 09:03, Tom Felker wrote:
> BTW, I just discovered a very relevant oggenc bug which can cause data
> loss:
>
> $ flac --ogg foo.wav
> ...
> $ ls
> foo.ogg
> foo.wav
> $ oggenc foo.ogg
> Opening with ogg module: Ogg FLAC file reader
> Encoding "foo.ogg" to
>          "foo.ogg"
> at quality 3.00
>
> ...and oggenc hangs, and truncates the file!  What would be the proper
> response here?  Should I have to specify an output file?  What if I was
> doing a bunch of files?  Should I have to specify an output directory
> (oggenc can't do this yet)?  Must I make a script?  See how much easier
> separate extensions would make things?

Bringing up bug reports in the middle of flamewars that none of the developers
are participating in (because we've gone over this about a thousand times
before, and we're not interested in wasting any more of our time) is not
very
productive.

Fortunately, I'm still at least scanning some of the messages here.

This is obviously a nasty bug, I'll go and fix it now (it doesn't cause
a hang
here, but does truncate the file).

Mike

<20040620190623.GF9120@xiph.org>
<200406211332.17596.jwm@eslnz.co.nz>
Message-ID: <20040621021500.GH9120@xiph.org>

On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 01:32:17PM +1200, John Morton
wrote:
>
> 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.
That's right.  You need a media player.  Anything with OggFile support
can play any form of media, wether it's audio which lacks a video stream
or video that lacks an audio stream.  The old days where you have
audio-only media players is pretty much phased out, with the exception
of hardware players.  Even the (future) players which lack video support
will still be able to play the audio part of the video.

And speaking of these legacy players, there's going to be the issue of
having them play non-Vorbis streams after awile.  Everything is going to
have to be upgraded to use OggFile anyway.
> 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.
I disagree.  "Ogg" is as specific as we can get without dropping off
into an abyss of illucid extension bloat.

A good example is lossless vs lossy.  Users may want to encode to both
so that they can re-encode, but easily transport the lossy versions
around.  As far as wether it has a video stream or not is not the issue,
but the user may want them to open in different programs.

What about a demuxed Ogg?  You have subtitles in one, audio in another,
video in another, but they're all part of the same master file.  And you
want them each to be opened in their own seperate editor.  What do you
call the subtitle-only one?  What about the metadata codec?  Do these
get their own extensions?  Why not, if audio and video do?

No.  The .ogg extension is enough to pass the stream to something that
can understand it, and the user-side app can do all that custom stuff on
it's own.  Inventing new extensions puts us on a massive slippery slope.
> Hang on. Are you suggesting that there be only one mime-type for all files
> that are ogg containers?
<snip>
> 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.
We already have an official mime-type.  Please atleast research what
you're debating before suggesting massive changes like this.
application/ogg has been official, through the IETF, for a long time
now.  It is associated with the .ogg extension.

This discussion, and all of the arguments and viewpoints put forth in
it, has been hashed out atleast three times over the last few years.
It's been played out so many times that the core development team has
resolved to simply ignoring this "Eternal Fucking Extension Flamewar"
so
they can spend their time on more important things, like getting OggFile
Theora and Icecast shipped.

The Ogg helper app has been suggested many times.  Nobody has written it
yet, and yes, it would be a good solution.

I've personally committed to writting it in Python using py-ogg2.  It
should be completely portable to Windows and Mac once libogg2 matures a
bit more.  It will allow automatic renaming of batch files, ie,
mymovie.TheoraVorbis.ogg or mymovie.video.ogg, or moving these batch
files to different directories by a rule (movies/ and music/), and could
also contain the rules for opening certain apps when the switcher is run
with a file as it's argument.  I also plan to have this app be available
in a compiled form (no python interpreter needed) for Windows.

<20040620190623.GF9120@xiph.org>
<200406211332.17596.jwm@eslnz.co.nz>
<20040621021500.GH9120@xiph.org>
Message-ID: <20040621022306.GA25291@patrick.wattle.id.au>

Arc Riley wrote:

| On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 01:32:17PM +1200, John Morton wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That's right.  You need a media player.

I don't /want/ just One Media Player.  Microsoft would have me use
Windows Media Player for everything, but I don't think much of that
idea either.

| Anything with OggFile support can play any form of media, wether
| it's audio which lacks a video stream or video that lacks an audio
| stream.  The old days where you have audio-only media players is
| pretty much phased out, with the exception of hardware players.

I happen to like text-based audio players but obviously text-based
video players are not practical.  I'm probably in a minority here, but
I'm sure there are many others who prefer their audio and video
players to be separate.  Watching a movie and listening to music are
two quite distinct activities for most people; music is often on in
the background while you're doing something else, whereas watching a
video essentially rules out doing anything else at the same time.

Programmes that attempt to cater to both are almost universally bad at
one or the other.  Sure, they might use the same library to decode all
kinds of Ogg media, but that's just an implementation detail to me-the-user.

Cheers,

Cameron.

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004, Paul Martin wrote:
> .ogg for purists, .ogv and .oga for realists.
>
> Ogg is a container format, just like *IFF. Should all WAV and AVI files
> be renamed .RIFF for consistency?
>
> By the way, citing the Mac harms your case. The "extension" part
of a
> Mac file is the four character creator-ID stored in the resource fork,
> a standard mandated by the operating system, and directly equivalent to
> the 3 character extension given to DOS files. This four character
> creator-id indicates to the Finder which icon should displayed for that
> file, and which program should be used to open it.
Anyone else want to take this discussion to another mailing list? We can
hash out a standard there without interference from the people here who
just dont 'get it'.

-Dan

<20040620190623.GF9120@xiph.org>
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<20040621021500.GH9120@xiph.org>
<20040621022306.GA25291@patrick.wattle.id.au>
Message-ID: <20040621225609.GD741@griffon>

Cameron Patrick (cp@chem.com.au) wrote:
> I'm probably in a minority here, but
> I'm sure there are many others who prefer their audio and video
> players to be separate.
I'd bet a rather large amount of money that you're in the *majority*
of Unix-like system users.  It might be different for Windows and Mac
users.

Anyway, Monty has spoken: Xiph gets only one extension from IANA, and
that's .ogg, so they can't advocate anything else even if they wanted
to, which they don't.

So the rest of us get to use whatever works.  To me, it looks like the
winner is .ogv.  Anyone want to come up with a mime-type so I can update
my Apache config files?  (Not that I actually have any Theora files
yet; but I will eventually.)

--
Greg Wooledge                  |   "Truth belongs to everybody."
greg@wooledge.org              |    - The Red Hot Chili Peppers
http://wooledge.org/~greg/     |
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On Mon, 21 Jun 2004, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> Anyway, Monty has spoken: Xiph gets only one extension from IANA, and
> that's .ogg, so they can't advocate anything else even if they
wanted
> to, which they don't.
It looks like this is not set in stone by IANA.

http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/mathematica

3 extensions.

http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/vnd.visio

4 extensions.

-Dan

Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> wrote:
>
> So the rest of us get to use whatever works.  To me, it looks like the
> winner is .ogv.  Anyone want to come up with a mime-type so I can update
> my Apache config files?  (Not that I actually have any Theora files
> yet; but I will eventually.)
I'll give it a try... :) Here's my suggestion for what to add to
mime.types:

video/x-ogg                     ogv oggv ogm
audio/x-ogg                     oga ogga

(This is in addition to the already existing application/ogg.)

Comments?

--
Patrik R?dman
patrik at iki dot fi
http://www.iki.fi/patrik/