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
Just going to leave this xkcd comic here.
Yes, you already know what it is.
I wish there was a more standardized open format for documents. And more people and software should use markdown/.md because you just don’t need anything fancier for most types of documents.
This is the kind of thing i think about all the time so i have a few.
- Archive files:
.tar.zst
- Produces better compression ratios than the DEFLATE compression algorithm (used by
.zip
andgzip
/.gz
) and does so faster. - By separating the jobs of archiving (
.tar
), compressing (.zst
), and (if you so choose) encrypting (.gpg
),.tar.zst
follows the Unix philosophy of “Make each program do one thing well.”. .tar.xz
is also very good and seems more popular (probably since it was released 6 years earlier in 2009), but, when tuned to it’s maximum compression level,.tar.zst
can achieve a compression ratio pretty close to LZMA (used by.tar.xz
and.7z
) and do it faster[1].zstd and xz trade blows in their compression ratio. Recompressing all packages to zstd with our options yields a total ~0.8% increase in package size on all of our packages combined, but the decompression time for all packages saw a ~1300% speedup.
- Produces better compression ratios than the DEFLATE compression algorithm (used by
- Image files:
JPEG XL
/.jxl
- “Why JPEG XL”
- Free and open format.
- Can handle lossy images, lossless images, images with transparency, images with layers, and animated images, giving it the potential of being a universal image format.
- Much better quality and compression efficiency than current lossy and lossless image formats (
.jpeg
,.png
,.gif
). - Produces much smaller files for lossless images than AVIF[2]
- Supports much larger resolutions than AVIF’s 9-megapixel limit (important for lossless images).
- Supports up to 24-bit color depth, much more than AVIF’s 12-bit color depth limit (which, to be fair, is probably good enough).
- Videos (Codec):
AV1
- Free and open format.
- Much more efficient than x264 (used by
.mp4
) and VP9[3].
- Documents:
OpenDocument / ODF / .odt
- @raubarno@lemmy.ml says it best here.
.odt
is simply a better standard than.docx
.
it’s already a NATO standard for documents Because the Microsoft Word ones (.doc, .docx) are unusable outside the Microsoft Office ecosystem. I feel outraged every time I need to edit .docx file because it breaks the layout easily. And some older .doc files cannot even work with Microsoft Word.
- @raubarno@lemmy.ml says it best here.
- Archive files:
MKV It supports high-quality video and audio codecs, allowing for lossless compression and high-definition content. Also MKV supports chapter and menu functionality, making it suitable to rip DVD to MKV and store DVDs and Blu-ray discs.
zip or 7z for compressed archives. I hate that for some reason rar has become the defacto standard for piracy. It’s just so bad.
The other day I saw a tar.gz containing a multipart-rar which contained an iso which contained a compressed bin file with an exe to decompress it. Soooo unnecessary.
Edit: And the decompressed game of course has all of its compressed assets in renamed zip files.
.tar.xz masterrace
This comment didn’t age well.