if you could pick a standard format for a purpose what would it be and why?
e.g. flac for lossless audio because…
(yes you can add new categories)
summary:
- photos .jxl
- open domain image data .exr
- videos .av1
- lossless audio .flac
- lossy audio .opus
- subtitles srt/ass
- fonts .otf
- container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
- plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
- documents .odt
- archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
- configuration files toml
- typesetting typst
- interchange format .ora
- models .gltf / .glb
- daw session files .dawproject
- otdr measurement results .xml
Ogg Opus for all lossy audio compression (mp3 needs to die)
7z or tar.zst for general purpose compression (zip and rar need to die)
The existence of zip, and especially rar files, actually hurts me. It’s slow, it’s insecure, and the compression is from the jurassic era. We can do better
why does zip and rar need to die
Zip has terrible compression ratio compared to modern formats, it’s also a mess of different partially incompatible implementations by different software, and also doesn’t enforce utf8 or any standard for that matter for filenames, leading to garbled names when extracting old files. Its encryption is vulnerable to a known-plaintext attack and its key-derivation function is very easy to brute force.
Rar is proprietary. That alone is reason enough not to use it. It’s also very slow.
why does ml3 need todie
It’s a 30 year old format, and large amounts of research and innovation in lossy audio compression have occurred since then. Opus can achieve better quality in like 40% the bitrate. Also, the format is, much like zip, a mess of partially broken implementations in the early days (although now everyone uses LAME so not as big of a deal). Its container/stream format is very messy too. Also no native tag format so it needs ID3 tags which don’t enforce any standardized text encoding.
(mp3 needs to die)
How are you going to recreate the MP3 audio artifacts that give a lot of music its originality, when encoding to OPUS? Past audio recordings cannot be fiddled with too much.
Also, fuck Zstandard, its a problematic format due to single file compression ability, hard to repair, not fully stable and lacking too many features compared to 7Z/RAR. Zst is also 15-20% worse at compression ratio. Its only a good format for temporary fast data transit applications (webpage/CDN serving, quick temporary database backups).
