How about matroska support in GKnot?

[CaptainCarrot]

I just read a post about matroska being released on the 1st of may, and there's something said about a vdubmod-version supporting matroska. Since I have no idea of how big the change to code would be I would naively suggest that matroska support should be added to gknot to give that container kind of a flying start. Any Intentions for something like that?

Yours curiously

[Hiro2k]

I second that motion, I would love to see these great projects helping eachother (VdubMod, Gknot Alpha, and Matroska).

[ssjkakaroto]

wouldn't it be better to wait and see matroska up and running before trying to implement it, imo it would be better to see a stable release with fully working ogm than a half working ogm and matroska

[CaptainCarrot]

Well, that's just the point why it took (takes) so long for matroska to get final: The matroska people have been waiting for support in applications, whereas the application programmers are waiting for a stable and perfectly working matroska before using it. But that way there's hardly any feedback to the matroska programmers, so the developement is not really going fast.
That's why i thought: if there's a working (maybe buggy) version of matroska being released 1st of may, then it should be supported as soon as possible so people will give feedback to the matroska developers. That should be imho the fastest way to a stable matroska.
OGM-support on the other hand would be nice, but would become obsolete with matroska-support, especially since ogm is being developed by 1 person only who's not developing it any further at the moment. Don't get me wrong here, i'm not "against" ogm or something, it's the only container i'm using at the moment, by i think matroska will just take over simply because of the developerpower behind it.

[ssjkakaroto]

i really don't think that's the reason why matroska isn't final yet, maybe coding a new format is really hard or maybe the developers don't have so much free time and have things in real life to take care of? i'm pretty sure when matroska is ready lots of apps supporting it will popup and there'll be plenty of feedback

[Doom9]

I'm with ssjkakaroto on this one. Give the scene time to properly test out something new before everybody jumps on the bandwagon and produces rips that have issues. OGM took a while to stabilize (and in the eyes of many it's still not stable enough - the DivX release scene has opted to not allow it and while this might not be the best indicator, those people do care a lot about compatibility while not being overly conservative (XviD got approved)) and I believe matroska should first show its strenghts in a production environment. Do not forget that it's not trivial to implement a new container (both for the matroska developers and the application developers). afaik ogm will not make it into 0.28 final and len0x still needs reliable data on muxing overhead for various audio configurations before ogm can be implemented in 0.29.
There's a certain logic to have slightly less user friendly tools at the beginning (just recall mpeg2avi) which will mostly mobilize experienced people, which then perform large scale testing and help out iron the bugs, before applications become more accessible and thus are more widely used. It's like with GKnot, not every GKnot user is using the alphas, but once a stable 0.28 is out the masses will most likely upgrade again.
Now I guess I should try to find a free minute to look at the non public matroska releases to see how it actually performs.

[Belgabor]

Cyrius/suiryc reworked the whole muxing system for VDubMod 1.5 to make it more userfriendly. For those who haven't read the linked documents in the thread I posted in this forum:

- No more Save as AVI/Save as OGM, only Save As
- Streams & comments in AVI and OGM, accessible through the same dialog. (Although the allowed comments differ)
- All of that is accessible through mostly the same sylia functions, so if you support the new functions it doesnt really matter if you write as AVI, OGM or eventually matroska.

There's some things I have to code before a release and unfortunately I'm pretty busy with other things atm, but I hope we can do an alpha release (of VDubMod 1.5) soon.

Cheers
Belgabor

[ChristianHJW]

Thanks guys for the interest in matroska, here are the things to consider when thinking about adding it to GKnot :

- matroska files created with matroskadub ( VdubMod 1.4.12 ) are stable and absolutely spec compliant

- There are a couple of matroska features that are not supported in VdubMod yet, but these features are also not availalbe in any other container. Leaving those features away doesnt make the files spec incompliant, as these are not mandatory ( like md5 ID tagging, etc. )

- We dont have a working DShow parser right now, so even if you are able to create fully spec compliant files, it wont help you much if you cant watch them for the time being

- as Belgabor said, to support matroska from GKNot is doesnt really require a lot of changes, VdubMOd 1.5.x will come with native matroska support, and once you use it in GKNot you can write into matrosk files ;)

Only some of the more advanced features like setting aspect ratio flags different than 1.0 for the video streams will require specific adaption of GKNot when writing matroska files through VdubMod ....

[Suiryc]

Originally posted by ChristianHJW
- matroska files created with matroskadub ( VdubMod 1.4.12 ) are stable and absolutely spec compliant
Well beware : spec compliant files doesn't mean those files contains the correct data :p (since I had no way to test the audio streams muxed into the file with a DShow filter). Also Vorbis in Matroska isn't good with 1.4.12 (the headers aren't written).
Just wait for VDubMod 1.5.x for a better support.