[Matroska-general] MKV vs MP4

[Steve Lhomme]

Emanuele Fumagalli wrote:
>> IIRC MP4 sucks for streaming because you need some information that 
>> are usually at the end of the file. Matroska doesn't need any 
>> information that are usually at the end of the file (like seek info).
> 
> Hi Steve, thanks for your info.
> Actually there's a way to have all the header at the beginning in MP4, 
> what I'm evaluating is the overhead needed from the decoder to strart 
> playing a video.
> I made a quick test and it seems that using MKV I can save 50% of the 
> header size, but I son't know why.
> Is there maybe some option in Matroska to compress the header even more?

Not really. It depends on what program you use to mux. For example 
mkvmerge leaves about 4 KB of data at the beggining in case it needs to 
write some more stuff later. Usually this space is not used. So 
modifying mkvmerge might allow saving a little more space. Other muxers 
may have similar things too. I think AVI-Mux GUI (from Alex Noé) is the 
most flexible for that.

Steve