Re: mime-type confusion

Markus Mehlau wrote:
> 
> is there anybody in the mpeg-community that takes care about the
> file-extensions?

This is a very good question indeed! I hope you don't mind
if I copy my comments on various relevant news-groups and
mailing lists.

Defining or standardizing MPEG file extensions is not in the
mandate of the ISO/IEC MPEG group.

In fact this is really a general problem:

It seems that there isn't any organization or authority
mandated to standardizing the use of file extensions
on the internet, although file extensions are often
used by web servers and web browsers to identify file
formats (cf. mailcap and mime.types).

So, what we see on the internet is de-facto adoption of some
extensions, which is often a source of confusion, I agree.

The most widely MPEG-related extensions that
I have seen for mpeg so far are:

.mpg - MPEG-1 video or systems (video+audio)
.dat - MPEG-1 systems on Video-CDs
.mp1 - MPEG-1 audio layer 1 (rare)
.mp2 - MPEG-1 audio layer 2
.mp3 - MPEG-1 audio layer 3 (often incorrectly called mpeg3!)
.m2v - MPEG-2 video
.m2s - MPEG-2 systems (video+audio)

Maybe it would have been nice if MPEG could have at least
"recommended" the use of particular file extensions for files
containing various types of MPEG data.  I hope that the
MPEG committee will keep that in mind when finalizing the MPEG-4
standard.

> markus mehlau [ multimediaDEsign ]
> 
> [ email ] mailto:markus.mehlau@munich.netsurf.de
> [ homepage ] http://homepages.munich.netsurf.de/Markus.Mehlau


Regards, -- Tristan Savatier (President, MpegTV LLC)

MpegTV website:   http://www.mpegtv.com
MPEG.ORG website: http://www.mpeg.org

Received on Sunday, 20 April 1997 17:29:37 UTC