On 10/2/06, Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves <justivo(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes. Perhaps you just didn't realize the OGM files you saw contained propritary codecs. Most software that will play Ogg/Theora will also play the Ogg/Xvid. Even Wikipedia knows: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg_Media It's checked into SVN, at least partially. It's not done yet. It was demonstrated at Wikimania. Google for Michael Dale SOC or something like that. :) Sounds good to me.

On 10/2/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra(a)baylink.com> wrote: Yuck, no. The extension gives you the option to play in your browser, the click to download/play locally link will remain. If you have the appropriate extension for native inline playing (the VLC extension, or some future firefox Ogg support that we muse about getting mozilla to include) it will be used when you activate the inline player. Iff you ask for inline playback and you do not have the approiate extension installed you will then be given the server provided Java based player. For most of Wikimedia's uses inline use is probably the most useful and expected behavior (since the audio / video is part of the content of the pages, just like with images)... but it wouldn't make any sense to change things in a way which precludes non-inline use and it certantly wouldn't make any sense to use a java based player over a native one.

On 10/2/06, Tim Starling <t.starling(a)physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote: [snip] Well there are tens of thousands of permutations of things that can go inside an ogg container.. Any combination of any number of streams made from: Theora (compressed video) Tarkin (compressed video) Dirac (compressed video) UVS (YUV 4:2:2 uncompressed video) Vorbis (lossily compressed audio (up to 256 channels)) Speex (lossily compressed audio, tuned for speech) Flac (losslessly compressed audio) PCM (uncompressed audio) Writ (efficient subtitles) Annodex (realtime XML stream) MIDI Plus a number of less supported things MPEG4 (via xvid, often called OGM) MP3 AAC DTS Ogg can multiplex any number of these streams in any mixture. A proper player is able to play only the streams it understands and skip the rest (although quite a few explicitly catch that case and abort... but the reference libogg stuff does the right thing). So, would you propose that each permutation get its own extension? Which subset? Proper desktop systems have been doing the right thing for ages now, for example the Gnome file manager doohicky (nautilus) correctly shows a thumbnail and movie strip views on video files, while it shows a music icon on audio files. Even Windows Vista can happily differentiate files with file magic... Extensions are just too inflexible to match up with reality... Ogg isn't at all the only container to give up on that.. for example, what extension does a PDF of layed out ascii have? A PDF of scanned pages? A PDF of postscript algorithms that computes fractals?

"Tim Starling" <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote in message news:efsjf0$a34$1@sea.gmane.org... that And there is no reason NOT to use different extensions. For example, on my machine I have associated .a95 with Access 95, .a97 with Access 97 and .a2k with Access 2000. I have no .mdb files (the native file extension). Aside from having to select 'all files' instead of 'MS Access Databases' when opening a file there is no disadvantage, but it makes things a lot easier and clearer, and it means the right application opens when I double-click the file. I _could_ name my .ogg video files .ogv and (after updating the file associations) have a much easier-to-use system. OR this standard could be adopted globally and make _everyone's_ life easier. I see no problem in .oga = audio, .ogv = video, .ogg = everything else - Mark Clements (HappyDog)

"David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:fbad4e140610030620i2e8356cayd9d02756bc9d789f@mail.gmail.com... wrote: Sure. Maybe I should have used .ogg = generic ogg file (which may be audio or video or something else). - Mark Clements (HappyDog)

On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 12:57:55PM +1000, Tim Starling wrote: Well, IMO, if you're going to say "this is a custom extension for an OGG container with only one type of content", you should do *both* .oga and .ogv, and then do that hard parsing at run time for .oggs that you couldn't pre-classify. The problem isn't "creating a new .ogv". It's "redefining .ogg as meaning something more specific than it does". If you're going to impose more specific semantics, do it to your *own* extension, not the standard one. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 "That's women for you; you divorce them, and 10 years later, they stop having sex with you." -- Jennifer Crusie; _Fast_Women_

On 10/9/06, Clarence Risher <sparr0(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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.

Chad Perrin wrote: Then you can do what non-GUI-file-browser users have done for over a decade with their MP3 files. Use a file-header-reading program to rename the files. Just because a few people can't read ID3 tags is not a reason for everyone in the world to give their MP3s huge filenames. MPEG4 is less than optimal in a few areas, such as multilingual subtitles. OGG+MPEG4 is a popular (relatively) choice among fandub/fansub groups who translate foreign videos.

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. 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. 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.

Clarence Risher wrote: I never said otherwise. I said that a file containing video should be ogv, regardless of whether it contains audio. [snip section that Simetrical answered] These applications need to support it because they are responsible for delivering information about the file to the user. File magic is slow and unreliable. [snip section that Nick answered] Maybe there is some player that can play audio but not video. Who knows? My main concern is rapidly delivering information about the file to the user. Imagine a world without extensions. You could name your files like this: ~/quantum/data/The_Matrix ~/movies/The_Matrix ~/soundtracks/The_Matrix But it soon becomes obvious that this system is inadequate. You move your files around a lot, by email, DCC, bittorrent, etc., and that directory information is easily lost. People are complaining that they downloaded a file from bittorrent called The_Matrix, looking for the movie, and they just got a 10^6 x 10^6 Hamiltonian. So you decide to attach suffixes for disambiguation: ~/quantum/data/The_Matrix_data ~/movies/The_Matrix_movie ~/movies/The_Matrix_soundtrack Hmmm, but is the title "The Matrix movie" or "The Matrix" which is a movie? This is all very confusing. And "soundtrack" takes quite some time to type. So let's use "." instead of "_" to separate the title from the type, and let's use a standard set of abbreviations. ~/quantum/data/The_Matrix.data ~/movies/The_Matrix.video ~/movies/The_Matrix.audio Oh no, extensions! The anachronism returns! So why would anyone advocate .ogv over .video? The container format probably matters about as much to the user as the codec and encoding parameters. I can think of two reasons to include the container format in the filename: * Momentum, existing standards, support for legacy systems, etc. * Branding. We all love open source and want to make sure everyone knows that we're using it. There are lots of codec names which can also be used for branding, such as Theora and Vorbis, but Ogg is the umbrella brand. -- Tim Starling

On Tue, Oct 10, 2006 at 09:19:40PM -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote: On the other hand, I still don't see a downside to using .ogv for Ogg video formats, .oga for Ogg audio formats, and .ogg for uncategorized stuff. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] "Real ugliness is not harsh-looking syntax, but having to build programs out of the wrong concepts." - Paul Graham

On 10/11/06, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: [snip] Enough? Can you find any at all? Most of the OGM playing software I've seen (including mplayer with the default compile options) can't even play theora... (or on windows platforms, can't play without downloading a seperate codec). As the Wikipedia article says: "OGMs most often carry video encoded in the XviD format and audio in Vorbis or AC-3 (Dolby Digital)." The Wikipedia article also links to several OGM tools... and the ones I checked do not support Theora. (Note that Xvid is an open source implimentation of MPEG4, like Lame is an open source implimentation of MP3) It's all sort of a silly argument when there are quite a few .OGG videos on commons which are nothing other than AVIs renamed to ogg. (I really should see if I can easily identify them from the mime type field on the image table and just go mass convert them)..

On 10/11/06, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: [snip] I've always viewed this as geek preferences (multiple players) overriding usability for the common user.... as the realty is that Joe Average is viewing everything in Windows Media Player. So long as we don't use ".ogm" I won't protest the use of non-standard mime types and non-standard extensions ... but I do think that it's unfortunate that we're still prioritizing geek usability issues over common user usability on the playback side of things.

On 10/11/06, Mark Clements <gmane(a)kennel17.co.uk> wrote: [snip] Where is the urgency? Why not get a standard established before we change our behavior?

On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 04:05:15PM +0100, Mark Clements wrote: What's wrong with getting some idea of what the Wikimedia technical community would like to do, in terms of determining a direction for potential future involvement in the Ogg community? -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] "There comes a time in the history of any project when it becomes necessary to shoot the engineers and begin production." - MacUser, November 1990

On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 10:01:17AM -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote: It doesn't strike me as simply a "geek" issue. This is about trying to make Ogg as usable as possible. While you may think that insisting on using Ogg instead of WMA and WMV is "geeky", some of us care about the use of open formats for reasons of future compatibility and freedom from legal entanglements. It's something that could affect more than just the "geeks" in the long run. Unfortunately, having decided to use a truly open format, some of these apparently "geeky" discussions and decisions are necessitated by these circumstances. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] "Real ugliness is not harsh-looking syntax, but having to build programs out of the wrong concepts." - Paul Graham

On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 05:21:02PM -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote: Thanks for clarifying, then. I could, but maybe that's just me. Heh. 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. 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. 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."