[Matroska-general] Get matroska in the news again

[Christian HJ Wiesner]

Hi,

it has been a little bit silent with respect to matroska marketing 
lately, that was mainly my fault because i couldnt invest as much time 
as i wanted into matroska recently. Just to inform you about whats 
planned for the near future :

1. New matroska packs :

Nibor has uploaded a test version of the next packs, 1.0.2 . As some of 
you maybe dont know it, on many forums our  matroska pack has a lot of 
fans because its installing most of the stuff you need for DivX/XviD 
playback, and is tiny and slim. Unfortunately it also had bad press 
because of the problems caused by mmswitch coming with it, especially in 
combination with some older codec packs ( after installing matroska 
pack, in some severe cases no single AVI/MPEG would play anymore ).

My special thanks goes to our new team member Deedlette, who has been a 
firm protagonist of the matroska packs on various forums, mainly on 
http://suprnovaforums.org, and is mainly responsible for the great 
success the pack has even with non-matroska users. Welcome in the team 
Deedlette, we're glad to have you here !

The new pack will disable mmswitch by default, and come with an info 
page about when it is needed, as well as where to get better players 
with built in switchers. A link for those wanting to test is here : 
http://www.wiesneronline.net/downloads/matroska/Matroska_Pack_Full_v1.0.2_test.exe

This version does still contain some grammar bugs in the Info page, but 
they were all corrected thanks to the great input from alexnoe already. 
I hope that Nibor had the time to correct most of them in latest 
version, and i guess we will put it online as soon as he's ready to go ( 
great work Robin, as always :-) ! ).


2. TCME :

After the meeting last friday night it became obvious that jcsston has 
done some great work with respect to TCME already. His work was based on 
robux4's native MSVC port, and he has successfully ported many different 
plugins already. Only a nasty bug in the matroska muxer makes it 
impossible to release a first beta version already, including the 
capability to make a simple transcoder based on a XviD encoder plugin, 
allowing to create native MPEG4 MKV files from AVIsynth ( AVI ) input files.

I will talk to Jory how we proceed here now, as it was decided that 
Gstreamer will be ported using mingw instead, making most of jcsston's 
porting work on the plugins redundant as he had told me. During the 
meeting on IRC i made clear that jcsston will have the last word about 
this, because it doesnt help at all if other people make decisions he 
wont accept, and all work on TCME stalls because of that. We better have 
a working solution based on a fork of Gstreamer, than no solution at all 
IMO. Mosu promised to try to port Gstreamer via mingw this weekend, but 
i know he was busy with other stuff.

Jory also was briefly mentioning the possibility to use something like a 
hybrid solution, where the gstreamer core gets ported via mingw, but the 
plugins are ported natively, using MSVC for the compilation. I hope to 
be able to talk to him about that soon, so we can come up with a working 
strategy on how to proceed from where we are. Again, i expect once we 
release a first working version of this, and show the people what power 
is sleeping in this, we will see people jumping in to help us. It seems 
all thats missing now is that we find the bug in his ported matroska 
muxer plugin.


3. MIME types :

Is it possible to undergo the process of registering matroska as a MIME 
type, based on the great work of Martin Nilsson ? Shouldnt  we publish 
his specs on our homepage, and give him CVS access so he can update it 
once he makes some changes ?


4. MPC :

I will visit CiTay tomorrow night in Kamen, and receive Frank's PC form 
him. My plan is to be able to visit customers somewhat close to him in 
the same week wednesday, and to deliver the PC to Frank. This is 
necessary because i will leave to China for 10 days next week sunday, so 
i have to deliver it before or Frank will get it 2 weeks later only. 
Expect some hooray on most of the public forums, if i hand the PC over 
to Frank and make a picture of the shake hand in his appartment. 
Hopefully Frank will be able to give us some new code to play with, 
because MPC in matroska would simply rock :) !!

I hope i could give you some brief overview what the plans are for the 
next weeks to make sure people see we are an active project, even if the 
head devs are busy with more important private stuff for the time being 
( Jory, how is HTML2DVD doing ;-) ). Comments welcome, as always :-) ....

Christian