[NUT-devel] questions about "Language" info packets

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 04:26:11PM +0100, Clemens Ladisch wrote:
> Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 12:38:35PM +0100, Clemens Ladisch wrote:
> > > nut.txt says:
> > > |   "Language"
> > > |       ISO 639 and ISO 3166 for language/country code
> > > 
> > > Does "ISO 639" mean ISO 639-1 or ISO 639-2?
> > > Are both codes required or allowed?  If yes, in what format?
> > 
> > that is a very good question, as the example below is a ISO 639-2 code
> > i think its clear that ISO 639-2 is allowed
> > 
> > furthermore there is a link
> > http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/englangn.html
> > pointng to 639-2 but none to 639-1 so id say 639-1 is not allowed
> > also all 639-1 codes have a code in 639-2 while many 639-2 codes
> > do not have one in 639-1
> > comments are of course welcome ...
> > 
> > > |       something like "eng" (US English)
> > > 
> > > When using a three-letter code from ISO 639-2, should a nut writer use
> > > the bibliographic or the terminology code?
> > 
> > that is also a very good question, i think none of us was aware that there
> > are 2 different codes for some languages (that is one based on the native
> > word for the language and one based on the english word) but luckily the
> > majority of the languages has just 1 code
> 
> And we Germans are out of luck and cannot use nut?  ;-)

Huh??

> If the language code were just used as a code, it wouldn't matter which
> one is to be used, but there are certain players that just display the
> raw code instead of converting it to a language name, so I think it
> makes sense to let the encoder choose which one to use.

If this isn't acceptable to the user then the user should choose a
player with more "user friendly" display. Existing legacy devices
won't play nut files anyway so it's something of a non-issue.

> > > Are two-letter codes allowed at all?
> > 
> > id say no
> 
> So ISO 3166 is out, too?

I'm against 2-letter codes. The number of languages is way too large
for these codes to be remotely sufficient.

> OK.  Proposed new description:
> 
>     "Language"
>         An ISO 639-2 (three-letter) language code, e.g. "eng" for English
>         (see <http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php>).
>         All codes defined in ISO 639-2 are allowed, including "und"
>         (Undetermined), "mul" (Multiple languages) and the bibliographic/
>         terminology variants.
>         For historical reasons, demuxers MUST treat "multi" like "mul" and
>         "" (the empty string) like "und".

Historical reasons?? There are no such files, and this is a draft
(albeit frozen) spec. I don't see any way that translating "multi" to
"mul" and "" to "und" would improve functionality over just treating
them as an unexpected value. If there's cruft in the spec that can be
removed without really hurting anything, I'd like to remove it.

Rich