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On Friday 16 January 2004 12:05, Opera wrote:

I might be stupid, but after some brief overlooking all the mails I get,
there are things that I kindof don't get. One of those is this MIME
type.
MIME types doday are implemented in cases only where they are somewhat
useful,
and I'm pretty certain DC isn't one of them.
Are we gonna Search by MIME-types? If so, why? I find _NO_ reason
whatsoever
for supporting this.
So if someone could be gentle enough to - in One mail - tell me why I
should
implement such support then please, do it.

Well MIME-types have several advantages, for one it's standard and it's a generic way of indicating the media type and what to do with binary data.

In other words it separates naming and contents which is quite usefull for many applications. Like which application should be launched when you double click on a file. Well that's not entirely true... on Windows, because windows relies on filenames to be correct, and simply maps filenames to MIME-types. I don't trust a filename on a remote computer to be correct, but _hopefully_ the mime-type is.

Example 1:
So your .MPG wasn't an MPEG-file after all, but it works because Mediaplayer was kind enough to figure out it was some WMV file after all and loaded the apropriate codec.
Example 2:
Mediaplayer doesn't handle MPEG-2 without installing a third party codec - which may cost up to $150, and thus you want to open all MPEG-2 files in VideoLAN instead (it's free :). Some moron you just downloaded a video from actually renamed his MPEG-file to WMV. MediaPlayer cannot play it... hm... it must be a corrupt file, so we download it agian... well... still doesn't work... now what?

MIME-types _can_ fix this... IF and only IF it's implemented by looking on the contents and not the filename itself.

In DCTNG I proposed using MIME-types and MIME-encodings (as seen in HTTP).
It also adds flexibility, now you can search for all kinds of movies by using the wildcard: "video/*" and hopefully get mpeg, wmv, quicktime, real and many more in one result. The equalient would be a search for a list of several file extensions (which _might_ be wrong).

This adds other possibilities to the protocol itself, how about Audio or video streaming while you're downloading by piping it through the appropriate program - Way cool?

In my opinion we should strive to make a generic protocol, which can be extended without ugly hacks and usefull for more than just the DC filesharing we are limited by today.
Cheers

janvidar

- -- - -janvidar-

Dj Offset / QuickDC
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