What exactly
is the disadvantage to using two different file extensions for
Ogg rather than one?
The disadvantage is that they are arbitrary, and convey almost no useful
information about the actual contents of the file.
Well I don't know about you, but being able to quickly and easily determine from
filename alone whether something is a video or an
audio file is most definitely "useful information" to me.
And, to bring up an
odd anti-example, would you have us rename a Theora+Vorbis file from
.ogv to .oga just because we deleted the Theora stream?
If you have a video + audio file, and you delete the video stream, then yes, it would make
sense for the file extension to change
from the video file extension to the audio file extension.
That would be
like having a dozen extensions for PNG images just to indicate which
chunks are used.
I don't care about PNG internal chunk encoding. Neither does 99.99% of the population.
That's why PNG uses one file extension, not a
dozen. People care about things that affect them. The distinction that matters to users is
audio-only versus video (with or without
audio). (Anything that falls outside that, most people don't care, *because it
doesn't affect them* .)
Ultimately however this decision will be made collectively by the users of these formats
converging on file extensions that work
well for most people, by people voting with their feet and thereby creating de-facto
file-extension standards where formal ones do
not exist. And from what limited in-the-wild usage that I have seen of these formats (the
MP3 and XviD/DivX formats are still
massively more popular) the trend does seem to be towards different file extensions for
audio and video.
All the best,
Nick.