On matroska.org, they mention that one the following goals is “Support adoption and implementation of Matroska’s libraries into OpenBeOS Mediakit”. The last news concerning BeOS is on 28/07/2003. Which is about a year ago.
Have the matroska people added code to Haiku? How far is Haiku to have a full matroska implementation into the Media Player?
I can’t seem to find anything about matroska on BeBits other than VLC and Mplayer.
Seems cool. Has this been outmoded by something more recent? What are the advantages over other implementable file schemes?
Has this been outmoded by something more recent? What are the advantages over other implementable file schemes?
VLC is crashy crashy when using MKV files. :x
OGM files also do the same thing.
The OGM container are extremely limited slow seeking, don’t support Unicode, don’t support embedded fonts etc… All these limitations, and more, are fixed with the MKV format. The MKV container is also future safe because it can be extended without breaking backward compatibility.The Matroska container format is clearly the best container format available today, so supporting mkv’s is a must.
See the links below for more info.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matroska
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_container_formats
Just, wanted to add some updated info about the Matroska container format.
The Matroska container format’s popularity has grown remarkably the last few years and is now the preferred container for HD-rips thanks to it’s flexibility and wide support for different video and audio formats.
It’s software support has also grown lately and playback support is really good nowadays. Some hardware support is also available with PopcornHour, Cowon A3 etc. A version 2 is also planned to add more features and will be backwards compatible, so the development of the format is active.
I hope that Haiku not only supports it fully natively, but also makes it the default container for both video and audio, because Matroska suites Haiku like a glove, and it’s time to stop using the obsolete avi container.
There is currently a Matroska reader in Haiku.
I am currently putting the finishing touches to add support for AAC streams in Matroska files. When we have a AVC/H264 decoder I will ensure that that is supported too.
Now for a rant:
There is nothing I have seen in Matroska that makes it better than many other modern containers out there. AVI is obsolete but MP4 is an excellent container and is being used by the media industry as opposed to people who like to give away someone elses work.
And don’t get me started on matroska file creators that could not even be bothered to write a decoder config private data entry for AAC so they can save FIVE BYTES!
Cheers
David
Come again? a config private data entry?
Many decoders require out of band configuration data. In the case of AAC it allows the decoder to determine what type of data stream it has to deal with.
This data is created by the encoder and is expected to be passed as is to the decoder.
From the Matroska specification for AAC tracks:
The private data is void. Channel number and sample rate have to be read from the corresponding audio element. Audio stream is stripped from ADTS headers and normal matroska frame based muxing scheme is applied.
Now, NO AAC decoder will start up without the private data being given to it so what does the demuxer pass?
What matroska decided is that the demuxer creates the data for the decoder by looking at the audio element and then doing the same job the encoder did to create the private data.
So what happens when the config data format changes (Like it did for HE-AAC). Instead of changing the decoder with one that does HE-AAC you need a new demuxer as well, one that can create the appropriate config data for the new decoder.
So until I figure out how to create the data the decoder wants for the 10 possible AAC configurations out there we cannot play back AAC audio in matroksa containers.
AAC support has now been added to the matroska reader. Please test and send feedback.
A link to any problem files would be appreciated.
Cheers
David
Correct me if I’m wrong but afaik there is no support for ogg vorbis, flac, wavpack, snow etc. in the mp4 container format and you cant add ssa/ass or even srt subs to it, so it can never replace matroska as a universial container format.
edit. replied to the wrong coment
Now, when the webm-container, wich is a simpler, web-adapted variant of MKV, is embraced by Google, it’s time that Haiku defaults to the best free container available. Avi and ogm are dead, mkv and webm will be the new standard in the future.