i seems we are now headed to have the same name comflic with .mp4 that we had with .ogg

Both file extension are being used for audio and movie contens.
This make it hard to tell the difference. And us windows user cannot play the files by to different programs (Winamp for audio MP4, MPC for movie MP4).

To fix the .oog conflict, most ogg movie/media files are renamed to .ogm (OGg Media).
so what about mp4 ?

mp4 for audio (look like mp3 "but better")
mpg4 for movies ? (looks like mpeg4)

or is there a program that could run and sort the files by the 2. last extension and run the appropriate program.
e.g.:
Timo Maas - To Get Down.audio.mp4
Doom the movie.movie.mp4

or does someone have a better solutons for the name extension conflict ?

I wouldn't change the extension, that would break compatibility with a lot of programs.

I usually keep my movies in a different directory than my music files.

You can also see if you like a program that supports playing of both MPEG-4 Audio and Video files (WMP, Quicktime, Real, ...).

Menno

1: how would it do that ?


2: i believe that most people would like to play aac-mp4 with winamp
cant WMP actually play those files ?.
besides, WMP (as an example) doesn't have the ability to control it ,when inside another program. E.g listing to music while playing som q3ta/ut2003


another question
Is the future of aac playback going to be in raw AAC or in the mp4 container.
It looks like playback of the mp4 container has main priority whereas playback of aac files are are slowly going away.
or is it just me ?

1) I think most programs check if they can open a file by looking at the extension. MP4 is chosen as the extension for MPEG-4 files, comapnies trying to support the standard will not go and change that and break compatibilty with all other MPEG-4 software (they are not doing all those interoperability tests for nothing).

2) The EnvivioTV plugin works in WMP.

3) The future of AAC is most probably within the MP4 container format (it's the standard, etc...).

Menno

If I'm not wrong, currently both mpeg1 and mpeg2 videos use the extension "mpg" (or "mpeg" sometimes). Why should mpeg4 be named mp4?

Because it's a completely different container format.

Menno

i dont think i ever encountered that with any of my programs.

if i chose open and *.* (if it sorts to only show .mp4 files) i can open the file no matter what extension, still as if it had the right extension.

i have never encoutered a program that would not open af file because of extenson not matching file contens.

I will broach this question here as I have elsewhere. What we need is someone with a knowledge of Windows programming that could write a configurable program that can inspect a files contents and not just it's extension. IIRC Windows is the only OS in the world which does not do this. And if Microsoft has it's way it will be the last if ever. A unified extension is propper and convenient. I don't know how much longer I can stand the whining of lazy Windows users. The fact is that something of this sort should have been done long ago. Unfortunatly something of this nature requires innovation, so we can count Microsoft themselves out of the running.

hum .. i see mp4 like avi.
it could contain audio and video with different format..

player that handle mp4 file could play video or/and audio that could mp4 files format could contain.

but where can we found informations about this format ?

You do know that something like that would make browsing of the file system at least 50 times slower than normally and chew up a lot more memory at the same time...? Imagine Explorer as it is today, but 10 to 50 times slower and using at least twice the amount of memory just to remember what type of files the files actually are...

That is pretty much false in it's entirety. Macs do it. BeOS does it. It happens under Linux etc. And they are not 50x slower. It all depends on the implimentation as to how much things will slow down. If done right the extra time would be almost unnoticable. Unfortunatly it is not possible to integrate it into the file system under Windows as pretty much every other OS does. But it would be possible to keep a simple central text database or a text database in each dir where such media resides. It is only updated as nescessary. And is often just read from to determine what the contents of a specific file type are. Reading a line from a file and making a decision based on it happens quicker than you can blink! There would be some file system overhead incured. But with drive sizes as larg as they are it is negligable as well.

That's right, but there's more to MPEG-4 than this... For example AAC will not be the only audio codec in this format, because for lower and lowest bitrates like 2 kbps (for mobile phones etc.) there are other specialized codecs that will do the trick. The whole concept is based on a wide and open standard that can contain many different solutions to specific problems. So for the audio part, this concept is called a "scalable codec".



The best source is always the official homepage... The MPEG has established an Audio Subgroup that provides many informations about all MPEG standards (nothing kept "secret" at all) in the form of FAQs and publically available MPEG documents. For MPEG-4 the link to the FAQ is:

http://www.tnt.uni-hannover.de/project/mpe.../faq/mpeg4.html

http://www.mpeg.org has a lot of good links on this subject.

and it was happening under amiga/directory opus for example, amiga was not known for its high-speed ide but the file recognition was working nicely, good point there was the option to define ur own formats depending on one or more files, also you could use different desriptors like some hex part of the file or/and worse the filename ending also...

good old version 4.x is avaliable under gpl @ http://dopus.amiga.pl/download.html