On Sat, Sep 16, 2006 at 03:13:12AM -0500, erik quanstrom wrote: > sure you could add a new function to file to handle the 15 or so > codecs that ogg supports, but i'm not sure you gain anything. do you > expect to have a lot of non-audio ogg that your player can't handle? > > i disagree with skip. i don't see the advantage to container formats. > they mostly encourage yet-another-(audio|video)-codex with some > neeto property that is inevitably less useful than standardization.
There's also .ogm[0] and .spx[1] that I believe are the same container but with different internals. FLAC[2] is also seen in ogg wrappers as well as in its own container[3]. Then there's also Matroska[4] that has .mkv / .mka split. I've only seen that used as a "better .avi/.asf/.mov". It's true that unless you're making some multimedia monster, those are probably some headache. I personally believe that file extensions aren't really useful for anything more than hints. Otoh, it really is annoying if a (supposedly) "ogg" player can't play flac or speex codec tracks just as well as it can do vorbis. Of course it all doesn't have to be crammed into one if you can separate those bits and make up something around that that will eat anything and give expected results whatever the technical details are. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg_Media [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speex [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC [3] http://flac.sourceforge.net/ [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matroska -- Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. -- John F. Woods
