[MPlayer-dev-eng] MPCF Draft/Discussion (MPlayer ContainerFormat)

[Robert R. Wal]

On 03.02.09 michael c pressed the following keys:

> The 'attachments' now have a fourcc, which was my idea too and is probably 
> the easiest way to do this. One might concider to elaborate though whether 
> mime types could be an alternative to this.

FOURCC is as good (or as bad) for describing content type as three
letter extensions are. I really don't understand the notion that three
letter dos-derived extensions are bad, and four letter, macos-derived[1]
fourccs are good. They are too short and thus equally cryptic.

But on the other hand, when dealing with multimedia content one would
have to develop whole new mime-type tree[2].

Thing is that the whole video/* tree today is plain wrong since
video/quicktime is indeed application/quicktime etc. If you wanted to
properly use mime-types to identify content you would have to use
something like video/mpeg4, audio/mp3, application/ogg or
audio/vorbis-in-ogg.

Even if you wanted to play by IANA[3] rules, process of registering mime
types with them is long, boring and stupid.

Probably leaving fourcc as they are is the best idea after all.

Robert

[1] as written by EA in their explanation of IFF the fourcc was derived
 from MacOS resource type field; adopted by MS today it is used in most
 multimedia formats and in it's original form in Palm OS.
[2] and establish some sort of central registry
[3] this is the authority registering mime type, isn't it?

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