It's too bad that the concept of having a system-wide plugin architecture for importing/exporting formats never caught on outside a few niche platforms. AmigaOS had DataTypes back in the '80s, and BeOS had Translators back in the '90s.

The Linux/FOSS world kind of approximates this just because applications are often built against the same underlying libraries and utilities, e.g ImageMagick or FFMpeg, rather than implementing their own import/export filters, but it'd be nice to be able to install a single system-wide datatype library for a specific format, and have all of my existing software instantly be able to read and write it.

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GrantMoyer 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Windows has, for a while, had Windows Imaging Component for images (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wic/-wic-lh) and Microsoft Media Foundation for video (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/medfound/mic...). Not sure how widespread actual use is though.

	▲	ack_complete an hour ago \| parent [-]
		WIC is reasonably widely used since it's used by WPF to load images. The problem is that a plugin codec structure exposes you to bad codecs. We had a tool at work break because someone installed a fast image viewer that overrode the default WIC JPEG decoder with a faster one that crashed loading our tool's splash screen image.

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etatester 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Codecs have been a thing on both major OSes, Windows Media Player could open DivX and QuickTime could open MKV. I think they were only limited to videos however.

	▲	kccqzy 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think QuickTime 7 had that capability (I remember installing a codec to make it play wmv video) but Apple removed the plugin architecture in QuickTime X.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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