this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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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
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (7 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

How about xz compared to zstd?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

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 -9 is better, but if you want compression that is almost as good but faster, zstd --long -19 is the way to go

At the lower compression presets, zstd is both faster and compresses better

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Not the original poster, but there are newer audio codecs that are more efficient at storing data than mp3, I believe. And there's also lossless standards, compared to mp3's lossy compression.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

How about tar.gz? How does gzip compare to zstd?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Both slower and worse at compression at all its levels.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

its worth noting that aac is actually pretty good in a lot of cases too

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

However, it is very patent encumbered and therefore wouldn't make for a good standard.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Big file size for rather bad audio quality.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

why does zip and rar need to die

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Again, I'm not the original poster. But zip isn't as dense as 7zip, and I honestly haven't seen rar are used much.

Also, if I remember correctly, the audio codecs and compression types. The other poster listed are open source. But I could be mistaken. I know at least 7zip is and I believe opus or something like that is too

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Most mods on Nexus are in rar or zip. Also most game cracks; or as iso, which is even worse.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I have seen RAR on Nexus, but I wouldn't say that it's common, at least for Bethesda's games, which is where I've seen it.

Things may have changed, but I recall that yenc (for ASCII encoding), RAR (for compression and segmenting) and PAR2 (for redundancy) were something of a standard for binary distribution on Usenet, and that's probably the main place I've seen RAR. I think that the main selling point there was that it was just a format that was widely-available that supported segmented files.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That would explain why I don't see them often. I haven't been very active in gaming as of late, let alone modding. And I generally don't pirate games. I'm cool with people that do, I just don't personally. (Virus fears, being out of the loop long enough that I don't know any good sites, etc)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

virus fears

Honestly, if desktop operating systems supported better sandboxing of malware, I bet that piracy would increase.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

(mp3 needs to die)

How are you going to recreate the MP3 audio artifacts that give a lot of music its originality, when encoding to OPUS? Past audio recordings cannot be fiddled with too much.

Also, fuck Zstandard, its a problematic format due to single file compression ability, hard to repair, not fully stable and lacking too many features compared to 7Z/RAR. Zst is also 15-20% worse at compression ratio. Its only a good format for temporary fast data transit applications (webpage/CDN serving, quick temporary database backups).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

How are you going to recreate the MP3 audio artifacts that give a lot of music its originality, when encoding to OPUS?

Oh, a gramophone user.

Joke aside, i find ogg Opus often sounding better than the original. Probably something with it's psychoacoustic optimizations.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago

The artifacts can determine the quirky sounds. They are like film grain in MPEG/WMV/AVI or the old VHS rips, you cannot recreate them in OPUS, because they get recorded that way. The recording gear and the mastering determines how the streaming audio should be encoded. OPUS probably is better sounding now with Sox Resampler equipped audio players.