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
  • @[email protected]English
    15•9 months ago

    For videos, I bet it was .mkv they mentioned. mkv can have different codecs and different tracks, including audio and subtitles. I see it used often for tv and movies. I’m not sure if there’s disadvantages to it for general videos, like ones shot right from a camera.

    I’ve been happy with .7z or .tar.* for file archiving and compression, but I don’t know the pros or cons of each. I think there’s room for different methods of compression though, so a standard format should be able to use multiple.

    For font families, .otf seems good for realtime text rendering. Seems any newer standards are mostly targeted at graphic design.

    • exuEnglish
      3•9 months ago

      Afaik the disadvantage to mkv is that it supports everything. That makes fully supporting and testing every case rather difficult and it’s why webm, a subset of mkv, was created.

    • Davel23
      3•9 months ago

      .mka is a real file format, it’s the Matroska audio container. Not very common, but I see them occasionally.