Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

On Tue, 2007-03-27 at 19:06 -0500, Terry Hancock wrote:
> Terry Hancock wrote:
> > I assumed this would be the most natural way, but
> > I may've been a little naive. I noticed some description at xiph.org of
> > putting such data in a separate "XML stream" alongside the data in an
> > Ogg container format. Advantages cited included being able to tag
> > combined audio/video streams, and not "abusing" the fields (from Vorbis
> > documentation page):
> > 
> > """
> > The comment field is meant to be used much like someone jotting a quick
> > note on the bottom of a CDR. It should be a little information to
> > remember the disc by and explain it to others; a short, to-the-point
> > text note that need not only be a couple words, but isn't going to be
> > more than a short paragraph.
> > """
> 
> Sorry, I meant to include my references:
> 
> http://wiki.xiph.org/Metadata
> http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html

I've been occasionally looking at OGG metadata for years.  The docs seem
to imply comments (which are just name value pairs) are the pool
step-sibling of some metadata format to be born, but as far as I can
tell there has never been a serious whack at the latter and comments are
very, very good relative to most other embedded metadata formats
(largely because these all tend to be overconstrained bitpacked
abominations), and although the docs warn against making up your own
comment fields, at least you can, unlike say ID3v2 which comes
pre-defined with dozens of junk fields.

All hail vorbis comments, [ab]use 'em!

-- 
  http://wiki.creativecommons.org/User:Mike_Linksvayer