mime types and video/audio files (was Re: Review of the thumbnailer spec)

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 12:24 -0700, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> 
> > In fact is it even worse for video thumbnailers, as the great guys of
> > the many multimedia frameworks and codecs decided to have types inside
> > of container MIME types. Making MIME mostly irrelevant for videos.
>  >
> > Thanks guys. For majorly messing things up once more in the world of
> > file formats. Making it all more difficult for all. Instead of simply
> > registering new MIME types that contain the codec in their MIME type
> > name (I still wonder why the heck not).
> 
> I hope you're not seriously suggesting something like 
> application/mkv-h264-mp3.  Because yes, you do need to specify all 
> three.  

Well, each combination is a new format. Right? That you have multi media
frameworks that can make combinations easily is great, but for me each
combination is still a separate format.

Now if I'd have a GStreamer (or whatever media framework) library call
like:

gboolean g_streamer_do_you_support (const gchar *that_string)

Then that would be great.

Regretfully right now it's basically a: try, if not, we didn't support
it, sorry. That's of course more expensive than above query.

What I'm most concerned about is knowing what I can give it, and what I
can't give it. In a fast way, preferably. And an equally fast way to,
given a GFile (or a URI), know that string that I can use to query.

Over HTTP, SMTP and IMAP I guess only Content-Type is standardized for
this. Which is why I naturally think about that string for making it
useful for this purpose.


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
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