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

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 10:44:57PM +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> > > 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.
> 
> well then lets add a
> "a muxer MUST ignore unknown language and country codes instead of treating
> them as an error"

Certainly. It's almost essential from a practical standpoint anyway,
since (I suppose... am I wrong?) language codes could be added to
639-2 after your implementation was released, making your
implementation suddenly become non-compliant if you rejected them.

Anyway from a usability standpoint, I think the important feature is
that a piece of software, when searching for a given (known) language,
is able to find such a stream if one exists. This doesn't require any
semantic interpretation of the codes, just an agreement on which codes
will be used.

Rich