[Matroska-general] Where do we go from here ?

[Steve Lhomme]

> Any input is *highly* welcome. (I will post mine next)

We all have different lifes, different interrests, different needs. And 
Matroska managed to be done within this "chaos". So I think there is 
still room for more, and even much more : we have more people involved 
now than one year ago, more experience. On the other hand, the more 
people there are, the less easy it is to coordinate things make everyone 
efficient (progress and have things actually done, not 50%). And as you 
obviously noted Christian and I have had less time to do that in the 
past few months (both for personal reasons, not lack of interrest). And 
it is the least interresting part of the "job", at least from a 
coder/creator's point of view. But we really need to spend more time on 
this.

Of course it's hard to convince people to work on something that will 
probably not give them any money (it's quite clear now that no company 
will ever pay us for the Matroska format, as everything is now 
completely free). And all this time we spend is worth money, especially 
for some of us who has a job (I wish I could be a student forever ;). 
And even with a few money we couldn't stop our jobs anyway. So right now 
  I think that we will be a large/growing project but only on our spare 
time. And this is an important part we have to take into consideration.

So from this spare time, what can we do ? What is needed ?

First, my personal needs :
- capture TV into Matroska (DirectShow based)
- capture DV into Matroska (with an efficient Matroska handling)
- reencode these captures to smaller MKV
- burn MKV movies as DVDs
- Musepack (MPC) in MKV/MKA
- support for MKA in iTunes

Some of these could be done with GStreamer. And the advantage of 
GSTreamer is that it may be working on Linux, Windows, OS X someday from 
the same code. So any tools based on these would probably be portable 
too. And we have to keep that in mind (that's also a reason why it's 
harder to get money/support, because no OS vendor is interrested in 
support something that will work as well for competitors).

It would be nice to have everyone make such a list, with overlaps, so 
that we can see the main projects/targets, who wants to work on them, 
how long it could take, how hard it is, etc. So we could define 
priorities and goals.