[NUT-devel] NUT documentation

[Rich Felker]

On Sat, Oct 28, 2006 at 11:10:30AM +0100, Måns Rullgård wrote:
> >> Some notes on rationale are welcome too, but not strictly necessary.
> >> 
> >> Now you may as well forget all this anyway.  Without a defined way of
> >> determining the codec for a stream, the format is useless.  As you
> >> have previously refused to do anything about this, I'm not pursuing it
> >> further.
> >
> > i never had a problem with identifying codecs with fourccs, at least
> > not more then i had with the mpeg systems (chinese avs and ac3 come to
> > mind here) really i dont understand why you like one integer more then
> > another
> 
> I prefer a DOCUMENTED integer over an UNDOCUMENTED one.  I don't give
> a rat's ass about the exact values.

OK then see below and add this to the spec...

> > the issue really is IMHO that every system which has been used in
> > practice to store many different formats has accumulated some mess
> > actually it seems that the number of formats used in practice and
> > the number of somewhat messed up cases (divx vs. mpeg4 for example)
> > is very highly correlated
> 
> That's because AVI doesn't specify anything, so you HAVE TO invent
> something.  Yeah, I've heard of some kind of official registry of
> codec IDs, but did you ever try finding it?

No, you don't have to. What you specify is: THIS FIELD CONTAINS VALUES
GENERALLY AGREED UPON BY THE PUBLIC. WHEN MULTIPLE VALUES ARE IN
COMMON USE, RECOMMENDATIONS ARE MADE AS TO THE PREFERRED VALUE FOR USE
IN NUT.

THERE WILL BE NO CODEC ID REGISTRY!

> > so sitting down and designing yet another will likely achive nothing
> > either its not used by anyone or it will accumulate the same mess
> > as every other system, or how do you want to prevent that?
> > if you use strings instead of 32bit integers you will end up with
> > a much much bigger mess because people _can_ missuse it much better
> 
> What you're saying is that because any system CAN be abused, rather
> try to start out with something sane, you incorporate an existing,
> already very abused, "system" lock, stock and barrel.  Makes no sense
> to me.

Look, we already finished NUT. This is over and decided. Please stop
bringing up old flames again! I am so sick of explaining over and over
why we made the decision we did and why it's vastly superior to all
the other proposals which claim to "fix the problem" but fail, and
moreover that there is in fact no problem to be fixed.

Rich