Hector Martin

Agreed - though, I think, given a format with "complete" data it should be possible to build tools to extract a subset and dump it elsewhere as a different format.

I pitched an IFF style one a while back but after thinking about it, this is actually very bad for streaming and it should be an interleaved format (at least).

So the question is, do you want to go all out and design a format that can be used on cheaper microcontrollers or FPGAs to implement optical disc emulators that interface at an analog level? Or stick to archiving/emulators leave that as extra challenge for someone to do later?

I feel that optical disc emulators of that sort would have a implementation-specific format due to the performance constraints; and trying to constrain a format intended for archival to those limitations would be unnecessarily restrictive.

Semi-related example, my delta 3d printer converts g-code to a preprocessed internal binary format to avoid runtime trigonometry. In other words, one can pre-process a well-known format to an internal format for performance reasons.