[Matroska-general] Matroska in 2005

[Christian HJ Wiesner]

Steve Lhomme schrieb:

> Hi,
> 2005 should be an important year for our little baby Matroska. So far 
> we have many small groups of people that like the format and use it 
> where/when they can. The key features for the moment are the wide & 
> "clean" subtitle support, as well as all possible codecs.

To be more precise, we have mainly the following user groups :

1. RV9/10 lovers, who want to combine their preferred video codec with 
SSA or vobsub subitles. In case you didnt know, RMVB can also hold
- AAC / HE-AAC audio
- Vorbis audio
- SRT subtitles
natively, RealProducer supports those formats since a long time already.

2. anime fangroups, who see in MKV the coolest container for the time 
being, offering them all they need ( especially SSA and unicode SRT ), 
with an excellent reputation amongst other ripping groups and rather 
good playback support on all platforms. Most them are using XviD with 
Vorbis or AAC in MKV, but i have also seen DivX5 rips occasionally. Of 
course, its mainly the very good soft-subs support that makes them 
consider to use MKV instead of AVI ( it seems they dont trust alexnoe's 
point of view on AVI's capabilities, as well as its future ;) ) and MP4.

3. audio rippers with a brave heart, who like our tagging approach ( 
standardized system ) better than the 'freedom' of free tagging ;) ... 
unfortunately they are a small minority currently, and we are missing 
Goldenear a lot, who was pushing this forward a lot :-(

4. capture freaks who like the perfect sync in MKV captures, thanks to 
timestamp precision ( most video and audio cards have incorrect A/D 
clocks, so a framerate based approach wont work well in some cases )

I fully agree with Steve here, the upcoming features you guys have been 
working on during the last months will certainly attracta LOT more 
users. Its an exciting phase we are moving in to, and i am looking a lot 
forward to it :-) !

> But in the coming days/weeks the format should be finalised with all 
> the features we dreamt of having when we created Matroska. That's a 
> huge step, since that means we can rely on things that won't change in 
> the near future. Maybe a bigger and cleaner documentation on the 
> format would help.

Shouldn't we go 1.0 with the specs once menue's are implemented ?

> So what should happen after that ? Matroska alone is not worth 
> anything. What people want (including ourselves) are some tools to 
> use. That means a good video editor that could support all our 
> features. And also be able to play them in their preferred audio/video 
> player on their preferred OS. And those two are huge tasks, even 
> bigger than creating Matroska and the few tools we have now.

That's the key ! People only use AVI still because there is Virtualdub, 
a free video encoding and editing tool ! Look at avi-mux GUI ( amg ) :
Its a great tool and will allow a lot of nice things for AVI, comparable 
to mkvtoolnix and MKV. Still the number of Virtualdub users is 50x times 
higher, and the ONLY reason for that is that amg can not encode video, 
and its editing possibilities are limited ( like mkvmerge ).

Once we manage to release a real alternative to Virtualdub, like 
VirtualdubMod, but leaving the boundaries of VfW, there is nothing that 
can stop MKV anymore !

> I hope to count on you all to make these things become true and give 
> Matroska the place it deserves (you'll judge for yourself).
> Back to work... ;)

If i find the time, i will start working on a FAQ document. If i fail to 
understand XHTML, i will simply make a WORD Document and leave it to you 
to make XHTML from it :D

Let me finish by telling you that i appreciate it a lot to be a matroska 
team member, and to have the chance to work with you guys on this great 
project :-) !

Christian