Kill the Stupid Media Formats

[RyuHayabusa]

I have to agree with the author of this article. Too many media formats are out there and it's not really worth having so many just to play a video. Here's the link to the article:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2286211,00.asp

Discuss.

[G.I.R]

Meh.  I say kill the stupid media rants.

[TC X0 Lt 0X]

Its true, we don't need 50+ different Media Formats.

But people are stupid and decide to make them for no reason.

[G.I.R]

It's one thing to say there are to many formats for sound or Video, but this guy right off the bat wants only three codecs for both.

[PyronIkari]

Uhm... there's a point to most of the formats. For the average user, it doesn't matter, all they care about is LOL PICTURE AND SOUND WORK! But for people that give a damn about encoding and quality, for those that give a damn about dubbing, text layers and being able to have free selection, and for those that care about rates and size ratios...

There's a point. What does it matter anyways? If it works for you, then it does, let those that actually have to deal with and care about format types keep the choices to do what they need.

[G.I.R]

I totally agree.

[Stormfalcon]

Uhm... there's a point to most of the formats. For the average user, it doesn't matter, all they care about is LOL PICTURE AND SOUND WORK! But for people that give a damn about encoding and quality, for those that give a damn about dubbing, text layers and being able to have free selection, and for those that care about rates and size ratios...

There's a point. What does it matter anyways? If it works for you, then it does, let those that actually have to deal with and care about format types keep the choices to do what they need.

Of course, the author of the article would consider caring about encoding and quality to be elitist. ::)

[PyronIkari]

Of course, the author of the article would consider caring about encoding and quality to be elitist. ::)

Of course. Because sound engineers, video editors, and journalists are all totally elitist.

Hell, I have to care about image and sound formatting at my job... in a heart lab. When dealing with customers we need images that are clear enough so that customers can see exactly what is needed, but small enough to store 1500 or so images etc A DAY and archive the past three years worth on our servers. It's why I was against shifting to PDFs. PDFs for 1500 images a day is nearly 300megs. We'd fill up terabytes to archive three years for uneeded quality.

[Kaura117]

People don't just make up new codes for the hell of it, folks. Some of it might arguably be fluff, but most of it was designed to fill a specific hole that the creator couldn't otherwise find tools to fill it with.

Whether or not they truly succeeded is something else altogether, of course, but I've only the barest noospheric overlap with the audiovisual groups, so can't speak definitively on anything other than the fact that .rm just plain sucks, period. Sucks massive, sweaty, gangrenous balls. Thank goodness for CCCP and MPC.

Edit: Wait, can't you scale the image quality for PDFs, Pyron?

[mDuo13]

PDFs can contain compressed JPEGs, but if you want to do vector-type images (which PDFs also do) then you're not as lucky.

If you just wanted compressed JPEGs, though, it makes no sense to wrap them in a PDF.

[JTchinoy]

i DLed a codec program to my computer, so i'm not complaining. :)