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| ChristianHJW |
| Posted: Apr 9 2003, 09:58 AM |
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Advanced Member
Group: Moderators
Posts: 1768
Member No.: 2
Joined: 7-July 02
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Hi all,
i apologize for the very long posting out front, if you're not interested in matroska, well, dont read it  .
The matroska project, with its predecessor/sister project MCF, was started about 2 years ago. Our aim was to build an open standard and open source A/V container project that was flexible and intelligent enough to last for the next 10 years, and to achieve this we did not just hack some code together quickly and release a first alpha into the wild, but instead we were making a lot of considerations about what such a container should be capable of doing, and we also tried to get advice from many different sides, like other opensource multimedia related projects, what they would consider as necessary and what options could convince them to support our container in their OSS projects.
After this long time, and believe me it wasnt always easy to take this route, the core dev team of matroska was happy and proud to be able to release a first alpha of libmatroska, the basic input/output library that can be used to read and write matroska files, beginning of this year. This library was greatly accepted from guys like Julien 'Cyrius/Suiryc' Coloos, the main developer of VirtualdubMod, and Moritz 'mosu' Bunkus, and they started to work instantaneously with it, building a great set of tools for both Windows and Linux for matroska file creation and also playback ( Linux ). As a result we are maybe capable of releasing a first set of tested tools soon, maybe even before the launch date named above.
So you may ask, what is it about the date that was named in the subject line, the 1st of May ?? Well, unfortunately not all sideprojects are coming along that well. We were maybe a bit naive to believe that every OSS developer out there would stop working on his project immediately, and start implementing matroska support into his tools. But, to be honest, the poor feedback we get from the OSS multimedia world out there is pretty demotivating for us, and we cant explain it at all. Its unacceptable to us that at least 20 - 30 developers in the OSS world are still investing their precious time into hacking strange things into AVI ( like SSA subtitles or DTS audio ), while a library exists allowing them to create matroska files with the very wanted content, but in a spec compliant and technically proof way.
Sure, we have some very good feedback also, like Ronald 'BBB' Bultje from the Gstreamer team announcing he might be able to look at making a Gstreamer plugin for matroska, or Mike Melanson offering to look at supporting at least playback from Xine, Francois 'mmu_man' Revol compiling the mplayer patches for OpenBeOS, etc. But besides that there seems to be not much interest from most other projects out there, and we believ to know why this is : When looking at OGM, the closed source container format based on Ogg ( made by Tobias Waldvogel ), its becoming obvious that the OSS developers only started supporting it after people were actually using it. Its interesting to see in this respect that for doing this there was no nice, clean library, instead the developers looking at it had to more or less reverse engineer the complete container, being major hassle for sure. But they did it, as there were users asking them to support it.
As a result of what is said above, we will change our strategy now. Instead of developing matroska to a very stable status on many platforms, and releasing it then to the public, we decided to release whatever we have on 1st of May. This measure is mainly undertaken to help us, the core dev team, to find the motivation again to work hard and even harder on getting matroska used and accepted, and hopefully that way we will also be capable of attracting the interest of other multimedia OSS developers, so they start supporting matroska in their apps, or maybe even contribute code to the main library.
There is one thing that may complicate releasing the matroska tools on 1st of May, and that is the missing DirectShow parser for Windows. Without this parser filter it will be impossible to release matroska to a broad audience. Our friend BlackSun had always predicted that this huge task is too much for only one person, and it seems our core developer Jan 'myFUN' Schlenker is currently extremely busy with real life stuff ( job ), so he cant contribute as much as necessary to develop the filter into a working alpha status until 1st May. We therefore created a task force yesterday to assist him in bringing the parser filter into a workable state until then. This task force will consist of 6 additional developers :
John 'spyder' Cannon
Ludovic 'BlackSun' Vialle ( DShow consultant, TCMP core dev )
Christophe 'Toff' Paris ( DShow consultant, TCMP core dev )
Steve 'robux4' LHomme
Jory 'Jcsston'
angelfire
All of them are looking at the M$ DShow SDKright now, trying to find out what is necessary to resolve the existing bugs in the current filter. Of course this means that they will stop their work on the current projects. Affected are :
spyder : MPV2MKV ; MPEG1/2 video to matroska
robux4 : libmatroska
jcsston : mpv2mkv GUI , mkvmerger GUI
I hope you all understand the necessity of this step and look forward to the 1st of May, together with us. Comments are welcome.
Regards
Christian
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Visit the unofficial Virtualdub support forum on http://forums.virtualdub.org - help to reduce the big number of emails Avery Lee is getting every day !!
Support matroska as container and Gstreamer as the only truely open, x-platform multimedia platform .... |
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| S_O |
| Posted: Apr 9 2003, 09:37 PM |
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Vdubmod Alpha Testing Team
Group: Vdubmod Alpha Testing Team
Posts: 102
Member No.: 57
Joined: 25-July 02
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I think, it´s quite important that the next official version of VirtualDubMod (1.5.x) has support for matroska, not a special matroska-version.
I tested VDMatroska with several codecs etc, no problem found, video works perfect. Now only reading audio support is missing. If that is included in the next version, matroska is already quite useable.
I think good support in VirtualDubMod is the same important as a DirectShow-parser. |
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| ChristianHJW |
| Posted: Apr 10 2003, 05:25 AM |
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Advanced Member
Group: Moderators
Posts: 1768
Member No.: 2
Joined: 7-July 02
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Dont worry  ... if only all developers would help matroska as much as Cyrius does, then we would be the most used container on this planet already ...
VdubMod 1.5.x will have almost perfect support for matroska right from the start, and Cyrius told us that in this version the matroska support will not be hacked on top of the ( also haked ) OGM support, but he was making things much much cleaner ..... and BTW, 'matroskadub' was always just a code name, it was always the plan to have matroska supported in official VdubMod  !!!
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Visit the unofficial Virtualdub support forum on http://forums.virtualdub.org - help to reduce the big number of emails Avery Lee is getting every day !!
Support matroska as container and Gstreamer as the only truely open, x-platform multimedia platform .... |
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| S_O |
| Posted: Apr 10 2003, 01:06 PM |
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Vdubmod Alpha Testing Team
Group: Vdubmod Alpha Testing Team
Posts: 102
Member No.: 57
Joined: 25-July 02
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If it´s a clean implementation, and matroska works fine, any chance to see it in the official VirtualDub?
I saw there is already a UCI dialog for video compression, is there already code behind it or is it just the dialog? Any testing for UCI? |
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| ChristianHJW |
| Posted: Apr 10 2003, 01:21 PM |
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Advanced Member
Group: Moderators
Posts: 1768
Member No.: 2
Joined: 7-July 02
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I was asking Avery already if he could consider doing so, but it seems he wnats to stick with AVI/VfW/ACM support in Virtualdub. At least he didnt really give me a clear 'no', so we have still have hopes he may change his mind one day ...
Biggest problem is of course the missing open standard codec API, without such its more or less bad hackery to write 'native' matroska files, only files in VfW and ACM compatibility mode can be done, and they are hardly any better than AVI  ...
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Visit the unofficial Virtualdub support forum on http://forums.virtualdub.org - help to reduce the big number of emails Avery Lee is getting every day !!
Support matroska as container and Gstreamer as the only truely open, x-platform multimedia platform .... |
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