[NUT-devel] attachments

[Måns Rullgård]

Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> writes:

> On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 02:17:22PM +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
>> Hi
>> 
>> How are attachments (cd cover image, fonts for subtitles, ...) 
>> supposed to be stored in nut?
>> As i originally designed things, info packets should have been used. But
>> after changes upon which some fanatically insisted info packets no longer
>> are flexible enough. They are required to be repeated after every header and
>> they can only apply to a single stream. Neither of these limitations was in
>> the original design.
>> 
>> So for 10 subtitle streams, we would need a minimum of 30 copies of
>> all fonts.
>> 
>> My original design could have stored a version of the font and still kept
>> proper references so that it was known to the demuxer which streams the
>> attachment applied to.
>
> </rant>
>
> i see many possible solutions.
>
> 1 just insist on seperate files

For fonts this makes the most sense, IMHO.  That is how they are
normally installed on a system.  If fonts are to be embedded, they
should be properly subsetted as in Postscript/PDF, not just pasted in
lock, stock and barrel.

I see little rationale for other suggested applications either,
e.g. cover art.  Cover art normally belongs to an album, not
individual songs, and personally I'd much rather have a directory of
files, one per album track, and a few JPEGs for cover art, rather than
embedding the covers in each track.  Not only would that waste space,
but normal image viewing applications would have trouble reading them
too.

As always, keeping things simple is probably the best solution.

-- 
Måns Rullgård
mans at mansr.com