9.7. Multimedia handlers

Media types (formerly known as MIME types, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, RFCs 2045-2049) is a mechanism for encoding files and data streams and providing meta-information about them, in particular their type and format (e.g. image/png, text/html, audio/ogg).

Registration of media type handlers allows programs like mail user agents and web browsers to invoke these handlers to view, edit or display media types they don’t support directly.

There are two overlapping systems to associate media types to programs which can handle them. The mailcap system is found on a large number of Unix systems. The FreeDesktop system is aimed at Desktop environments. In Debian, FreeDesktop entries are automatically translated in mailcap entries, therefore packages already using desktop entries should not use the mailcap system directly.