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> depend only on the formats installed by default in the system. Funny fact I've actually "invented" this philosophy (drivers for every file format being insta

> depend only on the formats installed by default in the system. Funny fact I've actually "invented" this philosophy (drivers for every file format being installed, managed and exposed to applications and scripts by an OS) when I was a child. I was amazed to see somebody has actually went implementing this idea (as far as I understand it works approximately this way in Haiku) > As an aside, MP3 is a format which requires licensing for decoding and encoding to be legal,so depending on the MP3 format is not a good idea unless your program deals specifically with it. This is not true, the patent has expired AFAIK and every desktop Linux distribution can play it out-of-the box for quite a long time already (and even if it would not have, people living in countries that don't have software patenting should be let to make use of their advantage). In fact MP3 is a great format to depend on as this is the only lossy audio compression format that really plays everywhere. AAC is better and can be played on the majority of modern devices and OSes but still not really everywhere, OPUS is the best but there still are so many devices and apps that don't support it unfortunately.

jenscow 8y ago
This page is from 2006.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
waddlesplash 8y ago
> as far as I understand it works approximately this way in Haiku Yep, it is indeed. You can of course write your own translators for custom file formats and install them along with your application; but then anything which already handled whatever representation they produced (e.g. PNG/JPG/etc. images -> BBitmap, Haiku's image buffer class) could then handle those filetypes also. > This is not true, the patent has expired AFAIK Only last year, and this document was mostly written a decade ago :) Haiku can now play MP3 out of the box also (and since the servers and buildbots are mostly in Germany, we don't really pay much attention to U.S. patents anyway at this point.)
- robotresearcher 8y ago
  Some in Germany do. For example the owners of the aforementioned mp3 patent. https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audiocodecs/mp3.html https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audi...
PavlovsCat 8y ago
> Funny fact I've actually "invented" this philosophy (drivers for every file format being installed, managed and exposed to applications and scripts by an OS) when I was a child. The Amiga got something like that with Workbench 2.0, actually: http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Datatypes_Library http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Datatypes_Library This is also very cool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AREXX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AREXX > ARexx can easily communicate with third-party software that implements an "ARexx port". Any Amiga application or script can define a set of commands and functions for ARexx to address, thus making the capabilities of the software available to the scripts written in ARexx. > ARexx can direct commands and functions to several applications from the same script, thus offering the opportunity to mix and match functions from the different programs. For example, an ARexx script could extract data from a database, insert the data into a spreadsheet to perform calculations on it, then insert tables and charts based on the results into a word processor document.
- vidarh 8y ago
  I'm not sure datatypes was before 3.0? But as a great demonstration of why this is fantastic: Amiga software written in the early 1990's [1] can open e.g. WebP files without modification, despite the format being released only in 2010. [1] Actually even some older ones - since AmigaOS lets you patch OS functionality quite easily, there's a tool - DTConvert - that patches library calls to intercept attempts to read non-IFF image formats and passes it through datatypes, to let even older programs load files supported by datatypes...

jenscow 8y ago

This page is from 2006.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

waddlesplash 8y ago

> as far as I understand it works approximately this way in Haiku Yep, it is indeed. You can of course write your own translators for custom file formats and install them along with your application; but then anything which already handled whatever representation they produced (e.g. PNG/JPG/etc. images -> BBitmap, Haiku's image buffer class) could then handle those filetypes also. > This is not true, the patent has expired AFAIK Only last year, and this document was mostly written a decade ago :) Haiku can now play MP3 out of the box also (and since the servers and buildbots are mostly in Germany, we don't really pay much attention to U.S. patents anyway at this point.)

robotresearcher 8y ago
Some in Germany do. For example the owners of the aforementioned mp3 patent. https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audiocodecs/mp3.html https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audi...

PavlovsCat 8y ago

> Funny fact I've actually "invented" this philosophy (drivers for every file format being installed, managed and exposed to applications and scripts by an OS) when I was a child. The Amiga got something like that with Workbench 2.0, actually: http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Datatypes_Library http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Datatypes_Library This is also very cool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AREXX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AREXX > ARexx can easily communicate with third-party software that implements an "ARexx port". Any Amiga application or script can define a set of commands and functions for ARexx to address, thus making the capabilities of the software available to the scripts written in ARexx. > ARexx can direct commands and functions to several applications from the same script, thus offering the opportunity to mix and match functions from the different programs. For example, an ARexx script could extract data from a database, insert the data into a spreadsheet to perform calculations on it, then insert tables and charts based on the results into a word processor document.

vidarh 8y ago
I'm not sure datatypes was before 3.0? But as a great demonstration of why this is fantastic: Amiga software written in the early 1990's [1] can open e.g. WebP files without modification, despite the format being released only in 2010. [1] Actually even some older ones - since AmigaOS lets you patch OS functionality quite easily, there's a tool - DTConvert - that patches library calls to intercept attempts to read non-IFF image formats and passes it through datatypes, to let even older programs load files supported by datatypes...