Talk:Container format

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This article was copy edited by e.w.bullock, a member of the Guild of Copy Editors, on 29 May 2010.Guild of Copy EditorsWikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy EditorsTemplate:WikiProject Guild of Copy EditorsGuild of Copy Editors articles

AV only?

Aren't there possibilities other than audio and video? I would agree that the idea is usually used to distinguish between different compression formats (whether lossless or lossy) - as opposed to uncompressed data - you don't get a format that is designed to contain spreadsheets in e.g. either CSV or Excel format. But what about images? I'm thinking of TIFF in particular, which allows a number of different compressed image formats.

VBR Delivery as apposed to encoding

I believe that an item for varaible bit rate delivery should be added to the Issues section. For example, depending on the bandwidth connecting the viewer to the video stream, one could view the same video in a lower resulotion/frame rate/bitdepth/artifacts/etc by skipping chunks of the file.

Nice idea, but the way you put that sounds like original research :-P.

Poor grammar?

This made me cringe and I was wondering if anyone else did the same when reading this:

"A container or wrapper format is a file format whose specifications regard only the way data are stored (but not coded) within the file, and how many metadata could or are effectively stored" I can have a go at cleaning it up myself, but was after someone elses opinion. Legios (talk) 05:04, 13 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A good chunk of the introduction to this article made me cringe, actually. There are way too many parentheses and comma, and at times it seems like there is a stretch for more wiki-links. I tried re-writing a sentence and I could barley understand what its purpose was. Below is a new version of the introduction that I think is more clear and still contains the relevant information for someone looking for more information. I'll wait for comments before putting it on the main page.

A container or wrapper format is a meta-file format whose specification describes how data and meta-data is stored (not coded). A program able to identify and open a container file might not be able to decode the contained data. This can be caused by the program lacks the required decoding algorithm or the meta-data does not provide enough information. By definition, a container format could wrap any kind of data. Though there are a few examples of such file formats (e.g. Microsoft Windows's DLL files), most container formats are specialized for the specific requirements of the data.

For example, a popular family of containers is found among multimedia file formats. Since audio and video streams can be coded and decoded with many different algorithms, a container format can be used to provide a single file to the user.

Sutekh.destroyer (talk) 22:53, 12 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Per Wikipedia's general policy, I have replaced the original introduction with the one written above. Feel free to improve it. Sutekh.destroyer (talk) 00:00, 24 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Why container?

The article should address why container formats are used instead of the "raw" content. 94.220.249.144 (talk) 06:03, 27 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

How so TIFF trashes Exif?

Removed the following:

, which results in difficulties in properly preserving information – notably, Exif photo data is often discarded.

I did a lot of work with TIFF in the late 1980s and the only reason I can think of for Exif lossage is sloppy coding, or a developer cutting corners to create a false impression of speed. Explain it so a software developer with 30 years of experience can comprehend it, or leave it out. My experience with TIFF was that it was disk seek intensive and only performed well if the file was written in a sensible order to disk. We had tools in house to do this which tripled the speed of many operations in a TIFF-like data structure we used to store font data. — MaxEnt 18:46, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Clarify Container vs content

"Since the container does not describe how data or metadata is encoded, a program able to identify and open a container file might not be able to decode the contained data. This may be caused by the program lacking the required decoding algorithm, or the meta-data not providing enough information.[clarification needed]"

Could one please find nice words for: A program can read (open) the container, but is not able to handle the content.

At least something that tries to explain it. It's obvious to me even though I did not write it.