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. videos .av1 (someone mentioned mka or something like that, cant recall but thet mentiomed it being a ‘container’)
  3. daw session files .dawproject
  4. documents .odt
  5. archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
  6. models .gltf / .glb
  7. plain text utf-8
  8. interchange format .ora
  9. configuration files toml OR yaml (disagreement)
  10. typesetting typst
  11. open domain image data .exr
  12. lossless audio .flac
  13. lossy audio .opus
  14. subtitles srt/ass
  15. container mkv
  • tal@lemmy.today
    5·
    9 months ago

    .tar is pretty bad as it lacks in index, making it impossible to quickly seek around in the file.

    .tar.pixz/.tpxz has an index and uses LZMA and permits for parallel compression/decompression (increasingly-important on modern processors).

    https://github.com/vasi/pixz

    It’s packaged in Debian, and I assume other Linux distros.

    Only downside is that GNU tar doesn’t have a single-letter shortcut to use pixz as a compressor, the way it does “z” for gzip, “j” for bzip2, or “J” for xz (LZMA); gotta use the more-verbose “-Ipixz”.

    Also, while I don’t recommend it, IIRC gzip has a limited range that the effects of compression can propagate, and so even if you aren’t intentionally trying to provide random access, there is software that leverages this to hack in random access as well. I don’t recall whether someone has rigged it up with tar and indexing, but I suppose if someone were specifically determined to use gzip, one could go that route.