|
|
| ChristianHJW |
| Posted: May 1 2003, 10:26 AM |
 |
|
Advanced Member
Group: Moderators
Posts: 1768
Member No.: 2
Joined: 7-July 02
|
Hi,
i have the big pleasure to officially announce that the matroska multimedia container project has finally left alpha status and turned into public beta status last night. By following the links below you will be able to obtain various tools to create, edit and play matroska audio and video files on your computers. Supported Operating Systems are currently Windows and Linux, but it seems at least playback is working for Mac OSX and OpenBeOS also.
The beta release of these tools is the last and maybe most important of the three initial steps to make matroska a living reality in the opensource community. After almost 18 months of development, always in contact with developers from various other opensource projects in the multimedia environment, we were able to come up with a working specification for the container end of 2002. From this spec our chief developer and project administrator, Steve 'robux4' Lhomme, could code a working basic I/O library called libmatroska, which was released in alpha version to interested OSS developers beginning of this year. Since then all efforts were undertaken to make file creation and playback possible, and in the meantime the main library was steadily developed further to its actual status.
The matroska container is mainly aiming to replace the good old AVI , but it is also ment to be a powerful and open alternative to other, mainly proprietary, containers such as ASF, MP4, MOV, RM, MPX and even MPEG. It uses the extensions .mkv for video and .mka for audio only files .
Here the main features of matroska :
- opensource, open standard, GPL and QPL licensed main library
- supports arbitrary file sizes, ideal for PCM audio and prepared for HDTV
- allows arbitrary number of audio, video and subtitles streams in one file
- attempting to support every existing audio and video codec under the sun
- extensible by using EBML as underlying framework, a binary structure based on XML
- enhanced container features such as menues, chapters, tags, file attachements
- perfect sync thanks to timestamps for data blocks
- x-platform design approach right from the start
etc.
Links :
The release page ( constantly updated ) : !!!! http://www.matroska.org/announce.html !!!!
matroska's homepage : http://www.matroska.org
The project page : http://corecodec.org/projects/matroska
CVS tree : https://corecodec.org/scm/?group_id=20
Here a listing of the tools that are released today :
LINUX :
All existing tools, as well for matroska file creation as well as for playback, were made by Moritz 'mosu' Bunkus, the author of the well known 'Ogmtools' . He was implementing playback support into mplayer for Linux, and the matroska support code was commited to mplayer CVS a few hours ago. His file creation tools, and this includes the sources, can be found here : http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/ . The program, in its current status, will allow you to transmux every AVI, OGM or matroska file into a new matroska file, plus to add several external audio streams from either WAV or Ogg sources ( Vorbis ) as well as AC3 and MP3 audio, and SRT subtitles.
Currently Supported codecs :
Video : all VfW/VCM codecs ( DivX, XviD, etc. ) ; Audio : Vorbis, MP2, MP3, AC3, PCM ; Subtitles : SRT
WINDOWS :
File creation : The VirtualdubMod Team around Julien 'Cyrius' Coloos and Tobias 'Belgabor' Minnich have implemented matroska reading, editing and writing support in such a professional way that Windows users will not have to suffer from any major drawbacks compared to the well established AVI format. The program is released from its usual place on http://sf.net/projects/virtualdubmod .
Supported codecs are all : VfW/VCM codecs ( DivX, XviD, WMV9 VCM, ON2VP3, HuffYuf, H.264, 3ivx, MPEG4V3/2, etc. ) ; Audio : all ACM codecs , Vorbis, MP2, MP3, AC3, PCM
Playback, DirectShow parser : Our core developer Jan 'myFUN' Schlenker created the basis, and the great development team from 'The Core Media Player' , mainly Ludovic 'BlackSun' Vialle and Christophe 'Toff' Paris, were pushing it to the actual release status. Please note that there is currently work done on the implementation of seeking as well as subtitle support ( to follow soon ). Occasionally the player may freeze if the pause/stop button is pressed. The file can be downloaded here : http://matroska.sourceforge.net/downloads/...emux-v0.3.0.zip ; unzip it into any directory and run regsvr32 x:\path\kaxdemux.dll from a command line .
Playback : The Core Media Player Team have made a special release of their feature pumped DirectShow player, the TCMP RC4 'matroska release edition' , to be downloaded here : http://www.corecoded.com . Its coming with the latest parser filter and will install it automatically, plus it can easily be registered to playback matroska files.
MPA2MKA and WAV2MKA : Both programs allow the user to transmux PCM or MP2/3 audio file into matroska audio files and were developed by John 'spyder' Cannon and Jory 'jcsston' Stone . Link : http://matroska.sourceforge.net/downloads/mpa2mka.zip and http://matroska.sourceforge.net/downloads/wav2mka.zip .
Future Features/Codecs ( still to come ):
- Menues
- Chapters
- MPEG 1/2 video support
- MPC SV8 audio compression support
- FLAC and/or wavpack lossless audio compression
- special mode 2 form 2 burning with ECC/EDC
- Image Subtitles ( BMP and PNG )
- Gstreamer plugin
- Vegas video plugin
- Xine playback patch
- AAC audio support
- Theora support
- streaming server ( UDP and HTTP )
- file attachements ( lyrics, cover images, etc. )
- p2p plugins including file ID
- Nero plugin
- winamp plugin
etc.
We hope you will find the container useful and are looking forward to your feedback. Please adress all feedback either to the mailing list matroska-general at freelists dot org , join us on IRC.CORECODEC.COM #matroska or turn to the forum here : http://corecodec.com/modules.php?op=modloa...pBB2&file=index
Thank you very much for your interest and my apologies to those who may feel bothered by the long postl
Christian Wiesner
--------------------
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 .... |
|
| fccHandler |
| Posted: May 2 2003, 05:18 AM |
|
|
Administrator n00b
Group: Moderators
Posts: 3961
Member No.: 280
Joined: 13-September 02
|
 Congratulations!
Not only you brought Matroska to life, but you beat me to 1000 posts (hehe). Go, Christian, go!
Best wishes,
fccHandler
--------------------
May the FOURCC be with you... |
|
| ChristianHJW |
| Posted: May 2 2003, 07:46 AM |
|
|
Advanced Member
Group: Moderators
Posts: 1768
Member No.: 2
Joined: 7-July 02
|
LOL ! I honestly didnt notice i was crossing the 1000 posts limit already  ... still not so much compared to the 2050+ posts i have on DivX.com ... although the last 50 posts took me something like 2 years  ....
--------------------
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 .... |
|
| ChristianHJW |
| Posted: May 11 2003, 10:52 PM |
|
|
Advanced Member
Group: Moderators
Posts: 1768
Member No.: 2
Joined: 7-July 02
|
New DirectShow filter is available from http://www.matroska.org/announce.html , its offering
- higher stability
- seeking in the file ( not limited to keyframes yet )
- play/pause/stop working fine
- support for WMV9 VCM playback
also
- TCMP CDL plugin for matroska, reading tags and AR flag
- win32 binaries for mkvmerger
Important :
- Current filter does not work with XCD Dshow filter anymore ( to come soon )
- Wont work on Win98 ( this OS suxx, it cant handle unicode in the code properly, we are looking into unicows now to fix that )
Have fun with matroska
--------------------
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 .... |
|
| ChristianHJW |
| Posted: May 19 2003, 03:45 PM |
|
|
Advanced Member
Group: Moderators
Posts: 1768
Member No.: 2
Joined: 7-July 02
|
New filter is out : http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&p...5391#post315391
--------------------
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 .... |
|
| ChristianHJW |
| Posted: Jun 9 2003, 09:46 PM |
|
|
Advanced Member
Group: Moderators
Posts: 1768
Member No.: 2
Joined: 7-July 02
|
New matroska DShow parser available from the Downloads page.
This new filter is adding
- CoreVorbis support
- DTS support ( untested ; muxing with either next VirtualdubMod or mkvmerger since 0.4.2 )
- Support for the new subtitles mediatypes, for working UTF8 subs playback in DVobSub ( Gabest is late, bug him to update it .. lol )
Important :
This new filter will be necessary to be able to play files created with next VirtualdubMod and mkvmerger release. The old filters may have difficulties recognizing the number of video/audio tracks correctly, with new files. Old files are still 100% supported and spec compliant, we just added a new EBML element to make handling of framerate easier for Cyrius and Mosu, and the old filters may have a problem with the new element.
Important 2 :
While this new filter works fine for one half of the team, its having problems for the 2nd half . We have no idea why, so dont delete you v0.4.2 installer yet ....
--------------------
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 .... |
|
| ChristianHJW |
| Posted: Jun 10 2003, 03:19 PM |
|
|
Advanced Member
Group: Moderators
Posts: 1768
Member No.: 2
Joined: 7-July 02
|
YES !!!!! 30 mins ago Gabest put the new vsfilter.dll online on his Guliverkli Project Page
So, finally, everybody making MKV files with UTF8 subs in VdubMod or mkvmerge can see them, and in correct UTF8 language ....
--------------------
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 .... |
|
|
