Why is Fedora a multimedia disaster? - Here is why.

[Les Mikesell]

Gérard Milmeister wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-04-18 at 15:45 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> Gérard Milmeister wrote:
>>
>>>> Applications that simply go by the extension name are doing it wrong and 
>>>> should be fixed. As it has already be pointed out there are better ways.
>>> Take an application such as nautilus. AFAIK, nautilus (or gnome-vfs, or
>>> whatever) used to look inside each file to determine what mime type it
>>> was, in order to display it alongside the name and attach an icon. This
>>> was very slow, since it had to open each file in a directory. Now it
>>> looks first at the extension, and if that does not determine the type,
>>> it looks inside it. Sometimes it guesses wrongly, and it makes you know
>>> about it when you try to open the file.
>>> Looking inside a file to determine a mime type is just another hack. The
>>> only correct way to do it is to attach meta-data to each file (using
>>> extended attributes, for example). However this would mean quite a
>>> radical change of how files are created, modified etc.
>> There's also no reason to think that getting meta-data would be any 
>> faster than getting data from the file - or that you would want a 
>> filesystem designed with something other than getting the file data as a 
>> higher priority.
> Meta-data (using extended file attributes) would be faster, since it
> wouldn't involve opening the file and trying to guess the file type from
> the file content. If you have selinux enabled, each file access involves
> accessing extended file attributes.

And how does that work out for you when you keep your multimedia files 
on exteral USB drives for portability among linux/mac/windows boxes?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com