Let's develop an open-source media archive standard

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Thu Aug 12 05:43:11 2004

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 22:54, Steve Thatcher wrote:
> what is wrong with making things easier? If a small amount of effort
> could be put out to make the image file have a more useful purpose
> then to ONLY be able to create media, why not? Your view seems to be to
> make all the emulators tyhat are currently available not work anymore
> because now they have to be modified to access an image file. My
> idea is to not change all that, make the image file simple enough to
> extract data.

I'd strongly recommend doing exactly that. Keep the data seperate from
the metadata describing it. Mixing the two really detracts from the
human readability aspect for starters - browsing a file with nicely
formatted structured data peppered with streams of encoded media data
(whether hex pairs, base64 or whatever) would give me a headache :-)

Aside from that, as Steve says, if someone wants to access the media
data itself without worrying about the extra cruft in the archive, they
can.

We've all seen good specs die before simply because they wasn't enough
of an incentive to use them outside of their specialised area - as a
viable project this is much more likely to work if it's easy to adopt by
anyone who currently has tools to do a similar thing (or a subset
thereof)

cheers

J.
Received on Thu Aug 12 2004 - 05:43:11 BST