[Matroska-devel] matroska patch by BBB for FFMPEG accepted and applied !!

[Christian HJ Wiesner]

Hi,

i have the great pleasure to announce that Ronald 'BBB' Bultje's 
matroska patch for FFMPEG was finally accepted and applied by Michael 
Niedermayer, the head FFMPEG developer. Michael had only a few minor 
critical points he wanted to have changed, and finally applied BBB's 
patch after these changes were done.

For the non-techies amongst you, FFMPEG is the most complete and 
probably also the best collection of opensource code for multimedia 
handling, its including complete MPEG1/2/4 en- and decoders ( both audio 
and video, organized in libav*codec* ), an 
AVI/MPEG/MP4/Ogg/RM/MOV/NSV/etc container handler ( demuxer for all, 
muxer for most, organized in libav*format* ), as well as decoders for 
many other video and audio formats.

Some of you may know that FFMPEG is the basis for Milan Cutka's FFDshow 
as well as for FFvfw. In principal it is now possible to include a 
matroska splitter into FFDshow, even if this makes no sense as we have a 
pretty good splitter filter, just to give you an idea.

FFMPEG is used by most opensource players, especially in the Linux world 
and if they are not DirectShow based, but players like VLC, Xine and 
mplayer are available for Windows and MacOS also, and all of them use 
FFMPEG for at least the decoding part of the majority of audio and video 
content AFAIK.

Its a great day for us that matroska has FFMPEG support now, as we can 
certainly expect wider and better player support now, and its also 
possible to concentrate matroska playback support for several important 
players in one single module, instead of having to update all the 
players independantly.

In the name of the matroska team i would like to express my highest 
appreciation to BBB for his incredible work on his matroska demuxer and 
muxer library. He made them originally for the Gstreamer multimedia 
framework and in plain C, and released them under the L-GPL license. 
Soon the idea was born to make a nice FFMPEG patch from it, and now he 
finally found the time to do it.

*BBB*, you're our hero !!! We cant thank you enough for this great 
contribution to our project and are happy to call you our friend !

Thanks for reading this short announcement

Christian
matroska project admin