{"id":1363,"date":"2009-04-09T22:16:22","date_gmt":"2009-04-10T05:16:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/?p=1363"},"modified":"2009-04-09T22:16:22","modified_gmt":"2009-04-10T05:16:22","slug":"of-filesystems-and-codecs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/of-filesystems-and-codecs\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Filesystems and Codecs"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been hanging out at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit<\/a>. One theme I have heard tossed around is the matter of filesystems– ongoing filesystem research, the need to upgrade standard filesystems in Linux, etc. I admit that I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about filesystems (except when I’m writing FUSE drivers for filesystems that lack wide appeal<\/a>). The filesystem is something that’s just “there” and should just work. Indeed, I have never had a major problem with any filesystem I have used while it is still considered modern. It is only when the next generation comes along that I understand the faults in the previous generation (journaled filesystems helped me understand that extensive integrity checking at boot time doesn’t have to be necessary; anything beyond FAT16 helped me understand that 8.3 filenames didn’t have to be the standard).<\/p>\n

But there is a category of obsessed individuals who spend a lot of time thinking about filesystems and measuring what they’re doing and figuring out how they could be doing things better. And it’s a good thing that we have these people around, even though most of us largely view filesystems as a transparent cog in the machine of daily computing.<\/p>\n

This got me to thinking about how it’s probably very likely that most computer users view multimedia codecs the same way that I view filesystems. An AVI file might contain Cinepak or MPEG-4 part 2 video, or any of 100+ video codecs<\/a>. Most users don’t have a reason to care about the difference. This may help to explain why some people (not particularly well-versed in multimedia technology) take it for granted that Theora could easily replace H.264 in all applications where the latter is in use today. <\/p>\n

They’re both video codecs, right?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I largely see filesystems as interchangeable; I realized that that’s probably how most people see multimedia codecs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[175,73,176],"class_list":["post-1363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-collaboration-summit","tag-filesystems","tag-linux-foundation"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1363"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1368,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions\/1368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}