How should AVI files be detected in avifile?

[Julius Schwartzenberg]

Hi,

Maybe you know, I hope to submit several fixes and tests for avifile 
soon. Vitaliy Margolen pointed out I should be create proper temporary 
files in the system's tmp directory so I implemented this. This actually 
showed a new bug in Wine's avifile:

Wine's avifile does not handle normal avi files with an filename 
extension different than avi (f.e. tmp), while Windows XP's avifile has 
no problems with those at all.

The problem is in this part of the code:
http://source.winehq.org/source/dlls/avifil32/api.c#L244

I discussed it with Roderick a bit on IRC and he said the whole registry 
check is flawed and there should be detection for AVI files based on the 
content of the file. I then did some tests and replaced line 247 (return 
AVIERR_UNSUPPORTED;) with "clsidHandler = CLSID_AVIFile;" which always 
forces the correct handler for AVI files. With that change I get the 
exact same behaviour as on Windows:
Proper AVI files always work, irregardless of their filename extension.
Files in which I replaced "AVI LIST" (the magic with which AVI files can 
be detected) with "AV2 LIST" in a hex editor fail on both Windows and 
Wine. On both they immediately fail with the error that my file is not 
an AVI file.

So this means that there already is proper detection in Wine based on 
the content of the file! There is just one extra obstacle in front now.

I'm not very familiar (yet) with COM, CLASS IDs and how files are 
generally handled in Wine. Also I don't really know much about VFW, I 
especially cannot imagine what other files than AVI files would need to 
be read using avifile (but from the code I except this is possible). So 
my question is:
What do you think would be an appropriate way to solve this? Should I 
just remove the obstacle or add my change? Or do something completely 
different? Also if anyone can shed more light on the current idea behind 
the code, this would be welcome!

Thanks a lot in advance,
Julius