On Sat, Dec 27, 2003 at 01:06:44PM -0800, Ben Barrett wrote: > I can suggest ncftp for a very good CLI FTP client.
lftp is also rather nice, but it is not always perfect (it doesn't show the MOTD for example..) > AVI is a wrapper, AFAIK, for a wide variety of stuff. Even for divx, there > are multiple versions. There are some alternative media players for 'bloze > on sites such as cnet's download.com ... best wishes for a media-filled new > year! AVI files are actually RIFF files given the AVI extension so you know that they contain video. RIFF is also used by WAV files, with the WAV extension meaning that the files contain PCM sound data with no or lossless compression. Apple's equivalent to RIFF is called moov. The name of moov is taken from its first tag which holds the header information which identifies the file's contents. Both come from the Amiga IFF file format, which is described by many Amiga fans as "binary XML". I do not know what the R stands for in RIFF, but RIFF is a little-endian format. The Amiga and mac both are big-endian. The structure of the file, regardless of whose version you're using, is as sequential blocks prefixed by a block size and type. I believe the size is a 32 bit number. The type is four bytes and is intended to be ASCII for some measure of sanity when viewed in a hex editor. ie, moov being the QuickTime format used originally for QT movies only, the identifier makes perfect sense. A little more useless/random information, file(1) indicates that WAV files are RIFF WAVE. You guessed it, WAVE is the name of the block which contains the header information telling you that the file is PCM data, what rate, how many channels, etc. Caveat 1: Whether the block name or size comes first, I can't remember off the top of my head. Caveat 2: Given how much uses the moov format these days, I have to wonder if I'm not mistaken about its origins with QuickTime. Caveat 3: I'm not sure if moov is in fact just Amiga IFF and the only thing special about it is the signature tag. Caveat 4: In order for IFF to be binary XML, one must see nesting. Indeed, there is nesting, but not as much as you find with XML. At some point in the file, you wind up with one or more huge bloxks of data in some format specified either by the header or the name of the tag itself. Vaveat 5: There are too many caveats in this bit of useless information. _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
