Comment by Supermariofan67@programming.dev on if you could standardise a file format for a specific task what would you pick and why

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

@dinckelman @Supermariofan67 I think you mean unsecure. It doesn’t feel unsure of itself. 😁

in·se·cure (ĭn′sĭ-kyo͝or′) adj.

Inadequately guarded or protected; unsafe: A shortage of military police made the air base insecure.

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/insecure

Unsecure

a. 1. Insecure.

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Unsecure

@hungprocess touché.

One thing I didn’t appreciate about English until reading a Europe forum for a while is that it has a lot of different prefixes that mean something like “not”, and this is not very intuitive to people learning the language. Their use is not regular.

Consider:

“a-” as in “atypical”
“non-” as in “nonconsentual”
“un-” as in “uncooperative”
“im-” as in “immortal”
“in-” as in “inconsiderate”
“il-” as in “illegitimate”
“mal-” as in “maladjusted”
“anti-” as in “anti-establishment”
“de-” as in “deconstruct”

And sometimes, some of the prefixes are associated with base words to form real words with similar meanings, but meanings that are not the same. For example, “immoral” and “amoral” do not mean the same thing, though they have related meanings.

@hungprocess Also this. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19653/insecure-or-unsecure-when-dealing-with-security

It seems that I was quite wrong, but that a lot of other people are wrong as well. lol

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.

Again, I’m not the original poster. But zip isn’t as dense as 7zip, and I honestly haven’t seen rar are used much.

Also, if I remember correctly, the audio codecs and compression types. The other poster listed are open source. But I could be mistaken. I know at least 7zip is and I believe opus or something like that is too

Most mods on Nexus are in rar or zip. Also most game cracks; or as iso, which is even worse.

I have seen RAR on Nexus, but I wouldn’t say that it’s common, at least for Bethesda’s games, which is where I’ve seen it.

Things may have changed, but I recall that yenc (for ASCII encoding), RAR (for compression and segmenting) and PAR2 (for redundancy) were something of a standard for binary distribution on Usenet, and that’s probably the main place I’ve seen RAR. I think that the main selling point there was that it was just a format that was widely-available that supported segmented files.

That would explain why I don’t see them often. I haven’t been very active in gaming as of late, let alone modding. And I generally don’t pirate games. I’m cool with people that do, I just don’t personally. (Virus fears, being out of the loop long enough that I don’t know any good sites, etc)

virus fears

Honestly, if desktop operating systems supported better sandboxing of malware, I bet that piracy would increase.

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.

Not the original poster, but there are newer audio codecs that are more efficient at storing data than mp3, I believe. And there’s also lossless standards, compared to mp3’s lossy compression.

How about tar.gz? How does gzip compare to zstd?

Both slower and worse at compression at all its levels.

What’s wrong with mp3

Big file size for rather bad audio quality.

I’ve yet to meet someone who can genuinely pass the 320kbps vs. lossless blind-test on anything but very high-end equipment.

People are able to on some songs because mp3 is poorly optimized for certain sounds, especially cymbals. However, opus can achieve better quality than that at 128k with fewer outliers than mp3 at 320k, which saves a lot of space.

Oh, yeah, not arguing that Opus is the superior format. It 100% is. Not questioning that.

Indeed, the first place that gets hit by lower bitrates with MP3 is high frequencies. MP3 does have a pretty harsh cutoff at very high frequencies… that the vast majority of equipment can’t reproduce and most ears can’t hear. It’s relatively debated, some claim to be able to “feel” the overtones or something like that. I’m extremely sceptical, if I’m being honest. Last time I did the test - must have been a decade ago - I couldn’t distinguish lossless and high bitrate MP3 any more accurately than a coin toss.

We’re not talking lossless. The comment above specified Opus-encoded OGG, which is lossy.

For example, I converted my music library from MP3 to OGG Opus and the size shrank from 16 GB to just 3 GB.

And if converting from lossless to both MP3 and OGG Opus, then OGG does sound quite a bit better at smaller file sizes.

So, the argument here is that musicians are underselling their art by primarily offering MP3 downloads. If the whole industry would just magically switch to OGG Opus, that would be quite an improvement for everyone involved.

Yeah, I’m aware. I probably wasn’t clear. I think MP3 is just the default cause of immobilism. People still using “physical” medium/digital libraries rather than streaming are becoming a rare breed, and MP3 is just… good enough. Also familiarity - I remember googling “some song - some artist mp3” being the easy way to find single titles in my teenage years lol, if I wasn’t aware of the new codecs, I’d probably default to MP3 without asking myself the question.

Well, I understood this post to mean, if you had a wish, what would you wish for? Not necessarily that it’s realistic…

I do agree with your points. Although, I can’t help but feel like more people would prefer local files, if those actually sounded better than the bandwidth-limited streaming services.

320 kbps is approaching lossless audio compression bitrates.

Opus does better in about half the space. And goes down to comically low bitrates. And his obscenely small latency. It’s not simple, but hot dang, is it good.

The Quite Okay Imaging guy did a Quite Okay Audio follow-up, aiming for aggressive simplicity and sufficient performance, but it’s fixed at a bitrate of 278 kbps for stereo. It’s really competing with ADPCM for sound effects in video games.

Personally, I think an aggressively simple frequency-domain format could displace MP3 as a no-brainer music library format, circa 128 kbps. All you have to do is get forty samples out of sixty-four bits. Bad answers are easy and plentiful. The trick is, when each frame barely lasts a millisecond, bad answers might work anyway.

yeah, but guess what opus is transparent at? depending on the music, anywhere from 96kbps to 160kbps.

I think that people overstate MP3’s losses, and I agree at 320k that it’s inaudible, but I can or at least have been able to tell at 128k, mostly with cymbals. Granted, cymbals aren’t that common, but it’s nice to not have them sound muddy. And, honestly, there just isn’t a lot of reason to use MP3 for anything compressed today, other than maybe hardware decoding on very small devices and widespread support. There are open standards that are better.

Oh, for sure. See my other comments. Opus is probably my favorite as well.

its worth noting that aac is actually pretty good in a lot of cases too

However, it is very patent encumbered and therefore wouldn’t make for a good standard.

aac lc and he-aac are both free now hev2 and xhe aren’t, but those have more limited use

How about xz compared to zstd?

At both algorithms’ highest levels, xz seems to be on average a few percent better at compression ratio, but zstd is a bit faster at compression and much much faster at decompression. So if your goal is to compress as much as possible without regard to speed at all, xz -9 is better, but if you want compression that is almost as good but faster, zstd --long -19 is the way to go

At the lower compression presets, zstd is both faster and compresses better

How are you going to recreate the MP3 audio artifacts that give a lot of music its originality, when encoding to OPUS?

Oh, a gramophone user.

Joke aside, i find ogg Opus often sounding better than the original. Probably something with it’s psychoacoustic optimizations.

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