On 10/9/06, Clarence Risher <sparr0(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not
suggesting that there should be an extension for every permutation.
I'm just suggesting that for files which are clearly video files, .ogv would
be an appropriate extension. There are two important applications for .ogg,
audio and video, is it really so horrible to suggest that one of them might
deserve its own extension?
You are making arbitrary distinctions. OGG containing Theora (the video
format of the ogg project) and OGG containing MPEG4 (via xvid, usually)
are just as different, in the same ways, as OGG+Theora and OGG+Vorbis
(or even OGG+MP3 or OGG+FLAC).
The end user doesn't care whether the file is Theora or MPEG4. The
end user cares whether the file is audio or video (for instance, they
might want to listen to it on a non-video-capable iPod, or in the
background while they're doing other things with visual space). The
end user can see the file extension but not, at least not easily, the
MIME type or file headers.
The application playing the OGG does care whether the file is Theora
or MPEG4. It doesn't care whether it's audio or video as such; from
its point of view, the distinction *is* fairly arbitrary. But the
application doesn't care about the file extension, it cares about the
MIME type and file headers.
Obvious conclusion: let the MIME type and file headers say whether
it's Theora or MPEG4, let the file extension say whether it's audio or
video. Otherwise the only way a user can tell whether something is
audio or video is by opening it, which is annoying.