Comment by Gormo
11 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's true, Windows has had an OS-managed codec system since 3.x. Only applies to video and audio formats, though, not a general system for any data type.
Gives me fun memories of installing the Intel Indeo codec on Windows 3.x and Windows 95 PCs to play videos from a CD-based encyclopedia.
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.