[NUT-devel] header packing for xiph codecs

[Ralph Giles]

On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 02:59:02AM +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:

> one thing though which id like to say (again) is that the global headers
> generally contain only data essential for decoding the stream. and because
> of that things like RTP and containers might try very hard to keep them
> intact possibly at the expense of startup delay and file size ...
> so putting comments, description and other metadata in them is IMO a very
> bad idea ...

Sure. In particular, the rtp draft has a mechanism for transmitting 
metadata updates separately, and currently says an encoder may want
to strip the metadata.

I was just trying to make it simple and consistent, so you can pass 
everything if you want, and not have to think too hard about it.

Anyone else I should run this by? I guess matroska have already done a 
format (similar, but using Ogg-style lacing for the length fields) so I 
guess it's too late for them. Anyone else working on containers?

> PS: as a quite off topic note, IMO RTP should be more generic and not
> require a new RFC for every codec (this is shitty design IMHO)

It's even worse than Ogg! :^)

 -r