Re: Survey ready on Media Multitrack API proposal

On Mar 2, 2010, at 11:03 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:

> Hi Michael,
>
> I saw your questions on the proposal, so thought I should reply  
> immediately.

Those were actually my questions, but I decided to delete my answer  
for now to avoid unduly influencing the answers of others. (For what  
it's worth, I think this is a good proposal and my questions are  
tangential to my general views on its merits).

>
>> 1) Is it a common use case to want to get a track by name? Is it  
>> common for tracks in a media file to even have unique names?
>> I am not sure namedItem() is justified.
>
> A name is the best possible way to address individual tracks. That
> name may well be a number in some media file formats, but the most
> general case is to provide a string.

The name being a number is something that won't work very well with  
the current API, since it will be treated as a numeric index, rather  
than as a name that happens to be a number. If you say tracks[1], is  
that supposed to be the second track, or the one named "1"?

You also didn't answer my second question -  are track names typically  
unique? Do media container formats generally guarantee the presence of  
unique track names?

Regards,
Maciej