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| ChristianHJW |
 Posted: Nov 29 2002, 09:54 AM |
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Advanced Member
Group: Moderators
Posts: 1768
Member No.: 2
Joined: 7-July 02
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Hi,
just for completeness i would like to inform you that thanks to some great input from Frank Klemm, the main developer of MPC, we are a very big step closer to completing specs for MCF, ver. 1.0 ( MCF-1 ).
A latest draft can be found here : http://mcf.sf.net/EBMLed/ , its about 60% done now. Old specs are here : http://mcf.sf.net/docbook/spec.html
EBML stands for 'Extensible Binary Meta Language' and to use it was mainly Frank's idea, who critisized on the old MCF specs that they are not extensible enough to allow future changes, without breaking backwards compatibility of older MCF parsers. The new specs will allow exactly this, but still the new files can be played with older versions of the MCF parser.
While alpha testing of various tools for MCF creation, editing and playback ( based on the old libmcf ) are already in full run we are still very interested in comments from developers on the propsed specs ( see link above ), as well as other contributors to help with tool creation.
More info :
1. It was finally decided to use UCI ( http://uci.sourceforge.net ) to interface codecs from libmcf ( encoder ) and MCF parsers ( decoder ). MCF will never use the old VfW API, unlike other new containers. Of course, there will be a way to transmux all or single streams from an AVI into MCF files, in a so called AVI compatibility mode ( similar to what OGM does now ). In this case a Dshow filter will be called for decoding, no UCI decoder ( normal AVI playback graph ).
2. We have test files with
- PCM audio
- MP2 audio
- MP3 audio
- RGB uncompressed video
- YUV uncompressed video
- Xvid video
All test files are created based on the old version of libmcf ( in MCF CVS, see sf.net/projects/mcf ), so they are outdated already and will not be made public, only a small alpha test team has access to them. The reason we play with those is to test the tools we have, means
Spyder's JMF based muxer/parser
myFUN's Dshow based muxer/parser
Suiryc's VirtualdubMod_MCF ( see alpha test section here )
The plan is to be able to bring the working tools quickly to MCF-1 final specs with an updated libmcf, once specs are finally freezed.
3. We have ongoing development ( same level as above ) to have MPC audio files in MCF, hopefully soon. For MPC we plan to have a win32 decoder in our Dshow MCF parser, as long as MPC has no UCI interface . More info on MPC here : http://141.35.2.84/~pfk/MPP/ and here http://www.saunalahti.fi/cse/index.html . Its planned to make MPC opensource also and to remove all currently existing patent infringements, so we can expect another excellent oepnsource audio codec to be available for Vdub, with a UCI API interface !!
Our to-do list currently comprises :
- Finalize MCF Dshow parser ( current version has no COM interfaces and cant do video for the time being, only audio )
- Develop MCF Dshow muxer ( this was started by myFUN/kromyx already, but not completed )
- Testing of Virtualdub_MCF , to create and edit MCF files ; adding possibility to call codecs via UCI instead of VfW/ACM later
- Assist with completion of UCI specs and libraries ( libuci ) on uci.sf.net
- Implement first UCI API interfaces into audio and video codecs ( Lame ? AAC ? Vorbis ? MPC ? AC3 ? XviD ? Theora ? )
- Test MCF4java based on JMF
- Assist with Java based MCF authoring tool -gemma
- develop winamp plugins for MCF audio file parsing and creation
- develop gstreamer plugins for MCF parsing/muxing
- develop OpenBeOS and MacOS parsers/muxers/editors
You see ... any help is very much appreciated .... its a very big task we accepted and there is still a lot to do
Lets make sure AVI and VfW have seen the end of its days, and also that Virtualdub will be the first tool to be able to use the new, open source standards !!
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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| ChristianHJW |
| Posted: Dec 5 2002, 09:52 AM |
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Advanced Member
Group: Moderators
Posts: 1768
Member No.: 2
Joined: 7-July 02
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Update ( 05/12/02 ) :
robux4 has finished the basic MCF specs, so everybody who would like to implement MCF now could start with that now.
Please note that the specs are not completely frozen now, as we first have to be able to create working alpha files to see if we have any major flaws in the specs. robux4 wants to start updating libmcf now ...
But definitely we are a big big step closer to our goal now  ! Stay tuned for the future of open source video encoding, of course with the help of Virtualdub !
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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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