Re: .wav file oddity
- From: "André Gillibert" <tabkanDELETETHISnaz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:17:08 +0100
Andy Mabbett wrote:
At first, I thought the issue could came from an incorrect Content-Type specification (e.g. text/html), but, with a manual HTTP request, I noticed that the Content-Type is audio/wav.
On:
<http://www2.birmingham.gov.uk/cs/Satellite?c=Page&cid=1165902603265&;
pagename=Birmingham.gov.uk%2FBCCLayout>
(aka: <http://tinyurl.com/3bfuf7> )
there is an image of an ear, which links to a 57-second, 2.5Mb, .wav
file.
Selecting the link in IE causes the file to play on the default player,
and downloading from that link saves a .wav file named "Satellite" (with
no file extension).
Doing so in Opera has the same results.
In FireFox, though, the file plays for only a second or so. Saving it
from Firefox saves it as an HTML file, also called "Satellite" (and
again with no file extension).
audio/wav is an unregistred type, very specific to Microsoft. The format itself isn't portable. The type may be unrecognized by many user agents. To ensure that your site is accessible on any OS with any browser, you should choose a widely recognized format, not Microsoft wave. Moreover, uncompressed audio files are inapproriate on the Web, where bandwidths are often limited.
Registred audio types are described at: http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/audio/
Anyway, the current problem with FF on the Windows OS is due to an oddity of the file type system.
The file format is recognized by the file extension on Windows.
Opera (and maybe IE) use local conventions to designate the format of resources, by mapping MIME types of web resources to file extensions, when saving such resources on disk. In other words, they choose the local file name from the last part of the URI, stripping the part after the '?' which typically identifies form requests, and appending an extension defined by the MIME type.
For the link http://www2.birmingham.gov.uk/cs/Satellite?blobcol=urldata&blobheader=audio%2Fwav&blobkey=id&blobtable=MungoBlobs&blobwhere=1174900262391&ssbinary=true, Opera uses the file name Satellite.wav by default.
By default FF 2 don't add this extension when saving the file (the default file name is Satellite). However, it adds the .wav file extension when opening the resource. So, I'm not able to reproduce your problem.
BTW: These URI are incredibely ugly, complex and likely to change! Please, *design* your URI, otherwise you'll follow the evil path of error 404.
--
If you've a question that doesn't belong to Usenet, contact me at <tabkanDELETETHISnaz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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