[Matroska-devel] Re: I'd like to help work on a matroska API

[Steve Lhomme]

Vegard Pettersen wrote:

> On Friday 10 September 2004 07:39, Moritz Bunkus wrote:
> 
>>Anyway. Which operating system are you using? And what kind of
>>experience do you have with programming? 
> 
> 
> I've got a Major's degree in Software Engineering from Queensland University 
> of Technology. My interests are C++, perl, linux, and Unicode. Currently I 
> use SuSE 9.1 on a shuttle.

All good.

> I am interested in helping out with matroska simply because the concept of 
> storing metadata in a common container appeals to me. In a perfect world, the 
> metadata should belong in the filesystem, but we don't and never will live in 
> such a world, so rather than having a bazillion of different fileformats all 
> trying to do _too_much_ with metadata, one container should find them and 
> in... well, be sufficient.

I completely agree on this. I care a lot about meta-information. All 
modern OS offer a way to store these informations or will in the near 
future. The problem is that it's OS dependant. When you transfer such 
files you completely lose all the meta data, especially since I don't 
know of any protocol that can transfer them over a network (maybe SOAP 
can do that quite inefficiently). So at some point you have to decide if 
you prefer these info to only remain on your computer or allow others do 
access them. That's where the containers come in. They allow storing 
meta-information that can be accessed locally and remotely.

We're almost done with the tagging system that will store the most usual 
meta-information about music and movies. You can have a look this URL 
and comment it :
http://www.matroska.org/technical/specs/tagging/

You can use this ML or our IRC channel irc://irc.corecodec.com/#matroska
(might be down while I write this)
There are also the forums on http://www.corecodec.com/

> If I can help out with the "CD-in-matroska", that would be preferable, as the 
> music-and-metadata of matroska interests me the most. I've got about 1200 CDs 
> which I have encoded with fLAC to single files and cue-sheets.

Wonderful ! At least someone who understand the need for a tagging 
system that can handle such case. AFAIK there is no other than Matroska 
that can do that.

Goldenear and Mosu have worked on it this summer. We already have 
alpha/beta softwares that can take your FLAC+CUE files and export them 
to Matroska+tags. Although since the tag system has been reworked I'm 
not sure it's still up to date. So you might first have a look (ask Mosu 
on IRC).

The second part you should have a look is the foobar2000 plugin which is 
the only way so far to play these files decently (otherwise they play in 
DirectShow but you won't have access to much tags). I think it's not up 
to date with the tag names and the tag architecture. So if you want to 
code something it could be that (first ;).

> Well, that should tell you a bit about me, and I'm looking forward to working 
> with you all.

Thanks a lot to you.