"Earlier this year, people in many places wrote about the 40th anniversary of the moment Ken Thompson sat down and started to work on UNIX (which is actually in August). In fact, UNIX celebrates another birthday this year, even though on a slightly smaller scale. In July 1974, exactly 35 years ago, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson published the first version of their seminal paper The UNIX Time-Sharing System in the Communications of the ACM."
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-07-14
No, it wouldn't.
How would it know it was a subtitle stream?
Would you require all files to have a subtitle stream?
What format would the subtitle stream be required to be in?
It seems to me that in order for it to work there would already have to be a stream format defined for the OS to know what was were. Any solution would seem to be non future compatible.
Byte streams, are actually much better. Ever study the OLE file format that was used by MS Office? There are quite a few revisions to the file type that are not compatible with each other, nor are they compatible with the new xml format. If that separation of document parts was implemented in the file system itself, they wouldn't have been able to make those changes with out major OS updates.
Member since:
2006-03-13
Yes, it's still sufficient. You see, anonymous byte streams are flexible things. Just because the operating system doesn't IMPOSE a set structure on files doesn't mean that they can't have one internally. Take, for example, your video example. Several container formats exist which provide the structure needed to implement multiple audio and subtitle tracks in a video. All you would need to do would be to agree on certain common container formats. Changing the filesystem itself is overkill.
Edited 2009-07-02 18:59 UTC