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:

  1. photos .jxl
  2. open domain image data .exr
  3. videos .av1
  4. lossless audio .flac
  5. lossy audio .opus
  6. subtitles srt/ass
  7. fonts .otf
  8. container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
  9. plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
  10. documents .odt
  11. archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
  12. configuration files toml
  13. typesetting typst
  14. interchange format .ora
  15. models .gltf / .glb
  16. daw session files .dawproject
  17. otdr measurement results .xml
  • @DigitalJacobin@lemmy.mlEnglish
    65•2 years ago

    This is the kind of thing i think about all the time so i have a few.

    • Archive files: .tar.zst
      • Produces better compression ratios than the DEFLATE compression algorithm (used by .zip and gzip/.gz) and does so faster.
      • By separating the jobs of archiving (.tar), compressing (.zst), and (if you so choose) encrypting (.gpg), .tar.zst follows the Unix philosophy of “Make each program do one thing well.”.
      • .tar.xz is also very good and seems more popular (probably since it was released 6 years earlier in 2009), but, when tuned to it’s maximum compression level, .tar.zst can achieve a compression ratio pretty close to LZMA (used by .tar.xz and .7z) and do it faster[1].

        zstd and xz trade blows in their compression ratio. Recompressing all packages to zstd with our options yields a total ~0.8% increase in package size on all of our packages combined, but the decompression time for all packages saw a ~1300% speedup.

    • Image files: JPEG XL/.jxl
      • “Why JPEG XL”
      • Free and open format.
      • Can handle lossy images, lossless images, images with transparency, images with layers, and animated images, giving it the potential of being a universal image format.
      • Much better quality and compression efficiency than current lossy and lossless image formats (.jpeg, .png, .gif).
      • Produces much smaller files for lossless images than AVIF[2]
      • Supports much larger resolutions than AVIF’s 9-megapixel limit (important for lossless images).
      • Supports up to 24-bit color depth, much more than AVIF’s 12-bit color depth limit (which, to be fair, is probably good enough).
    • Videos (Codec): AV1
      • Free and open format.
      • Much more efficient than x264 (used by .mp4) and VP9[3].
    • Documents: OpenDocument / ODF / .odt

      it’s already a NATO standard for documents Because the Microsoft Word ones (.doc, .docx) are unusable outside the Microsoft Office ecosystem. I feel outraged every time I need to edit .docx file because it breaks the layout easily. And some older .doc files cannot even work with Microsoft Word.

    1. https://archlinux.org/news/now-using-zstandard-instead-of-xz-for-package-compression/ ↩︎

    2. https://tonisagrista.com/blog/2023/jpegxl-vs-avif/ ↩︎

    3. https://engineering.fb.com/2018/04/10/video-engineering/av1-beats-x264-and-libvpx-vp9-in-practical-use-case/ ↩︎

    • @lloram239@feddit.de
      13•2 years ago

      .tar is pretty bad as it lacks in index, making it impossible to quickly seek around in the file. The compression on top adds another layer of complication. It might still work great as tape archiver, but for sending files around the Internet it is quite horrible. It’s really just getting dragged around for cargo cult reasons, not because it’s good at the job it is doing.

      In general I find the archive situation a little annoying, as archives are largely completely unnecessary, that’s what we have directories for. But directories don’t exist as far as HTML is concerned and only single files can be downloaded easily. So everything has to get packed and unpacked again, for absolutely no reason. It’s a job computers should handle transparently in the background, not an explicit user action.

      Many file managers try to add support for .zip and allow you to go into them like it is a folder, but that abstraction is always quite leaky and never as smooth as it should be.

    • @jackpot@lemmy.mlOP
      8•2 years ago
      • By separating the jobs of archiving (.tar), compressing (.zst), and (if you so choose) encrypting (.gpg), .tar.zst follows the Unix philosophy of “Make each program do one thing well.”.

      wait so does it do all of those things?

      • @DigitalJacobin@lemmy.mlEnglish
        18•2 years ago

        So there’s a tool called tar that creates an archive (a .tar file. Then theres a tool called zstd that can be used to compress files, including .tar files, which then becomes a .tar.zst file. And then you can encrypt your .tar.zst file using a tool called gpg, which would leave you with an encrypted, compressed .tar.zst.gpg archive.

        Now, most people aren’t doing everything in the terminal, so the process for most people would be pretty much the same as creating a ZIP archive.

    • @Laser@feddit.de
      7•2 years ago

      By separating the jobs of archiving (.tar), compressing (.zst), and (if you so choose) encrypting (.gpg), .tar.zst follows the Unix philosophy of “Make each program do one thing well.”.

      The problem here being that GnuPG does nothing really well.

      Videos (Codec): AV1

      • Much more efficient than x264 (used by .mp4) and VP9[3].

      AV1 is also much younger than H264 (AV1 is a specification, x264 is an implementation), and only recently have software-encoders become somewhat viable; a more apt comparison would have been AV1 to HEVC, though the latter is also somewhat old nowadays but still a competitive codec. Unfortunately currently there aren’t many options to use AV1 in a very meaningful way; you can encode your own media with it, but that’s about it; you can stream to YouTube, but YouTube will recode to another codec.

      • @DigitalJacobin@lemmy.mlEnglish
        5•2 years ago

        The problem here being that GnuPG does nothing really well.

        Could you elaborate? I’ve never had any issues with gpg before and curious what people are having issues with.

        Unfortunately currently there aren’t many options to use AV1 in a very meaningful way; you can encode your own media with it, but that’s about it; you can stream to YouTube, but YouTube will recode to another codec.

        AV1 has almost full browser support (iirc) and companies like YouTube, Netflix, and Meta have started moving over to AV1 from VP9 (since AV1 is the successor to VP9). But you’re right, it’s still working on adoption, but this is moreso just my dreamworld than it is a prediction for future standardization.

    • @piexil@lemmy.world
      3•2 years ago

      I get better compression ratio with xz than zstd, both at highest. When building an Ubuntu squashFS

      Zstd is way faster though

    • @ronweasleysl@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2•2 years ago

      Damn didn’t realize that JXL was such a big deal. That whole JPEG recompression actually seems pretty damn cool as well. There was some noise about GNOME starting to make use of JXL in their ecosystem too…

              • @DigitalJacobin@lemmy.mlEnglish
                2•2 years ago

                I get the frustration, but Windows is the one that strayed from convention/standard.

                Also, i should’ve asked this earlier, but doesn’t Windows also only look at the characters following the last dot in the filename when determining the file type? If so, then this should be fine for Windows, since there’s only one canonical file extension at a time, right?

                  • @DigitalJacobin@lemmy.mlEnglish
                    2•2 years ago

                    However, getting people used to double extensions is one quick way of increasing the success rate of attacks such as the infamous “.pdf.exe” invoice from an email attachment.

                    Very good point. Though, i would argue that this would be much less of a problem if Windows stopped sometimes hiding file extensions.

                    I can’t see how Windows’ convention is worse

                    I don’t believe what you’re referring to is really a Windows versus Linux/Unix thing.

                    If I zip a file, it doesn’t matter what it was in a previous life, it’s now a zip - this is also how Unix deals with many filetypes, I’ve never seen a .h264.mp4 file, even though the .mp4 container can actually represent different types of encoding.

                    I disagree, but i do get what you’re saying here. I don’t think that example really works though, because a .mp4 file isn’t derived from a .h264 file. A .mp4 is a container that may include h264-encoded video, but it may also have a channel with Opus-encoded audio or something. It’s apples and oranges.

                    Also, even though there shouldn’t be any technical issues with this on Windows, you can still use a typical short filename suffix if you wish, though i would argue that using the long filename suffix is more expressive. From “tar (computing)” on Wikipedia:

                    Compressor Long Short
                    bzip2 .tar.bz2 .tb2, .tbz, .tbz2, .tz2
                    gzip .tar.gz .taz, .tgz
                    lzip .tar.lz
                    lzma .tar.lzma .tlz
                    lzop .tar.lzo
                    xz .tar.xz .tx
                    compress .tar.Z .tZ, .taZ
                    zstd .tar.zst .tzst
              • @jaaval@sopuli.xyz
                1•2 years ago

                In this case it really seems this windows convention is bad though. It is uninformative. And abbreviations mandate understanding more file extensions for no good reason. And I say this as primarily a windows user. Hiding file extensions was always a bad idea. It tries to make a simple reduced UI in a place where simple UI is not desirable. If you want a lean UI you should not be handling files directly in the first place.

                Example.zip from the other comment is not a compressed .exe file, it’s a compressed archive containing the exe file and some metadata. Windows standard tools would be in real trouble trying to understand unarchived compressed files many programs might want to use for logging or other data dumps. And that means a lot of software use their own custom extensions that neither the system nor the user knows what to do with without the original software. Using standard system tools and conventions is generally preferable.

          • @sebsch@discuss.tchncs.de
            2•2 years ago

            I would argue what windows does with the extensions is a bad idea. Why do you think engineers should do things in favour of these horrible decisions the most insecure OS is designed with?