On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 05:21:02PM -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
I must apologise, because somehow I managed to make myself so unclear
that you completely misunderstood my position.
Thanks for clarifying, then.
I couldn't imagine a more inapropreiate person for you to direct your
complaints about free formats to, except perhaps Monty himself.
I could, but maybe that's just me. Heh.
.OGM, as I mentioned, is widely kludged hack to encapsulate MPEG4
(usually of the xvid flavor) in something that mostly resembles an ogg
bitstream. It has been suggested here that we use .ogm for movies
encoded with Ogg/Theora. I am strongly opposed to using this
extension because of two primary issues 1) it is widely used for a
proprietary format which we would not accept, 2) it is widely used by
tools which are incompatible with the free codecs we do accept.
Agreed -- .ogm is probably not the "right" file extension to use. I
like .ogv better for that, if we're going to invent an extension.
I also regard the desire to have different media players for different
media files to be something of an esoteric geek issue, as typical
viewers use a single media player... and that having standardized
behavior is simply more important.
If there's a way to satisfy both needs, however, I think it should be
adopted. Prioritizing one need as being more important than another
doesn't necessarily require ignoring the other entirely.
It really strikes me as disappointing the people here are expending so
much effort arguing about such trivial matters, .. and going
full-flame-on-mode over simple misunderstandings when so little work
is being done to aid in actual usability (via optional inbrowser java
playback, tutorials for contributors, advocating support for free
formats in things like firefox etc....). Today I pointed out that
something like 1 in 10 videos on commons are broken because they
aren't oggs at all (most of the broken ones seem to be renamed
AVI/WMV) the thread didn't manage to get but a fraction of the
attention that this thread has had.
People are probably expending "so much effort" because the decisions
made on this issue will affect them directly, with a few exceptions
where people are arguing based on principle because they believe their
position represents a "pure" adherence to standard or something like
that. For those arguing in favor of something that will affect them
personally, I'm sympathetic, whether I agree with them or not.
I think the reason the one-in-ten-broken issue hasn't received as much
attention is pretty simple and obvious, though: nobody disagrees that
it's bad, and should be fixed.
--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [
http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Amazon.com interview candidate: "When C++ is your
hammer, everything starts to look like your thumb."