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. 😁
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/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.
What’s wrong with mp3
Big file size for rather bad audio quality.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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How about tar.gz? How does gzip compare to zstd?
Both slower and worse at compression at all its levels.
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.
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 -9is better, but if you want compression that is almost as good but faster,zstd --long -19is the way to goAt the lower compression presets, zstd is both faster and compresses better