Matroska open source A/V container format officially released

[ChristianHJW]

Hi,

i have the big pleasure to officially announce that the matroska multimedia container project has finally left alpha status and turned into public beta status last night. By following the links below you will be able to obtain various tools to create, edit and play matroska audio and video files on your computers. Supported Operating Systems are currently Windows and Linux, but it seems at least playback is working for Mac OSX and OpenBeOS also.

The beta release of these tools is the last and maybe most important of the three initial steps to make matroska a living reality in the opensource community. After almost 18 months of development, always in contact with developers from various other opensource projects in the multimedia environment, we were able to come up with a working specification for the container end of 2002. From this spec our chief developer and project administrator, Steve 'robux4' Lhomme, could code a working basic I/O library called libmatroska, which was released in alpha version to interested OSS developers beginning of this year. Since then all efforts were undertaken to make file creation and playback possible, and in the meantime the main library was steadily developed further to its actual status.

The matroska container is mainly aiming to replace the good old AVI , but it is also ment to be a powerful and open alternative to other, mainly proprietary, containers such as ASF, MP4, MOV, RM, MPX and even MPEG. It uses the extensions .mkv for video and .mka for audio only files .

Here the main features of matroska :

- opensource, open standard, GPL and QPL licensed main library
- supports arbitrary file sizes, ideal for PCM audio and prepared for HDTV
- allows arbitrary number of audio, video and subtitles streams in one file
- attempting to support every existing audio and video codec under the sun
- extensible by using EBML as underlying framework, a binary structure based on XML
- enhanced container features such as menues, chapters, tags, file attachements
- perfect sync thanks to timestamps for data blocks
- x-platform design approach right from the start
etc.


Links :

The release page ( constantly updated ) : !!!! http://www.matroska.org/announce.html !!!!
matroska's homepage : http://www.matroska.org
The project page : http://corecodec.org/projects/matroska
CVS tree : https://corecodec.org/scm/?group_id=20


Here a listing of the tools that are released today :

LINUX :

All existing tools, as well for matroska file creation as well as for playback, were made by Moritz 'mosu' Bunkus, the author of the well known 'Ogmtools' . He was implementing playback support into mplayer for Linux, and the matroska support code was commited to mplayer CVS a few hours ago. His file creation tools, and this includes the sources, can be found here : http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/ . The program, in its current status, will allow you to transmux every AVI, OGM or matroska file into a new matroska file, plus to add several external audio streams from either WAV or Ogg sources ( Vorbis ) as well as AC3 and MP3 audio, and SRT subtitles.

Currently Supported codecs :

Video : all VfW/VCM codecs ( DivX, XviD, etc. ) ; Audio : Vorbis, MP2, MP3, AC3, PCM ; Subtitles : SRT


WINDOWS :

File creation : The VirtualdubMod Team around Julien 'Cyrius' Coloos and Tobias 'Belgabor' Minnich have implemented matroska reading, editing and writing support in such a professional way that Windows users will not have to suffer from any major drawbacks compared to the well established AVI format. The program is released from its usual place on http://sf.net/projects/virtualdubmod .
Supported codecs are all : VfW/VCM codecs ( DivX, XviD, WMV9 VCM, ON2VP3, HuffYuf, H.264, 3ivx, MPEG4V3/2, etc. ) ; Audio : all ACM codecs , Vorbis, MP2, MP3, AC3, PCM

Playback, DirectShow parser : Our core developer Jan 'myFUN' Schlenker created the basis, and the great development team from 'The Core Media Player' , mainly Ludovic 'BlackSun' Vialle and Christophe 'Toff' Paris, were pushing it to the actual release status. Please note that there is currently work done on the implementation of seeking as well as subtitle support ( to follow soon ). Occasionally the player may freeze if the pause/stop button is pressed. The file can be downloaded here : http://matroska.sourceforge.net/downloads/kaxdemux-v0.3.0.zip ; unzip it into any directory and run regsvr32 x:\path\kaxdemux.dll from a command line .

Playback : The Core Media Player Team have made a special release of their feature pumped DirectShow player, the TCMP RC4 'matroska release edition' , to be downloaded here : http://www.corecoded.com . Its coming with the latest parser filter and will install it automatically, plus it can easily be registered to playback matroska files.

MPA2MKA and WAV2MKA : Both programs allow the user to transmux PCM or MP2/3 audio file into matroska audio files and were developed by John 'spyder' Cannon and Jory 'jcsston' Stone . Link : http://matroska.sourceforge.net/downloads/mpa2mka.zip and http://matroska.sourceforge.net/downloads/wav2mka.zip .


Future Features/Codecs ( still to come ):

- Menues
- Chapters
- MPEG 1/2 video support
- special mode 2 form 2 burning with ECC/EDC
- Image Subtitles ( BMP and PNG )
- Gstreamer plugin
- Vegas video plugin
- Xine playback patch
- AAC audio support
- Theora support
- streaming server ( UDP and HTTP )
- file attachements ( lyrics, cover images, etc. )
- p2p plugins including file ID
- Nero plugin
- winamp plugin
etc.


We hope you will find the container useful and are looking forward to your feedback. Please adress all feedback either to the mailing list matroska-general at freelists dot org , join us on IRC.CORECODEC.COM #matroska or turn to the new A/V formats section here.

Thank you very much for your interest and my apologies to those who may feel bothered by the long postl

Christian Wiesner

[avih]

congrats ;)

[robUx4]

thanx :)
It took a lot of time but now it's here (to stay) and working :D

[Ookami]

Thanks.

:)

[BlackSun]

big thanks to the matroska team, who worked as a team and was so nice with their PC while debugging :D (yeah I lost my motherboard, cdburner and soundcard) Moo.

[Doobie]

There you have it from a reliable source. Using matroska can destroy your motherboard, CD burner, and sound card.

[Rasi]

1st file i muxed sadly stopped playing instantly... only 1st frame i can see.. slide of player not moving... mplayer 6.4 this was

i muxed an avi with its mp3 audio track, dunno if this is possible by now at all :P

will try without audio and a few different players also....

appreciating this work! matty will kick avi's ass, i am sure about that!

so going testing now :)

[BoNz1]

Wow, congrads. I just muxed my first matroska file with vorbis audio and it works perfectly. Thanks very much. It is pretty easy to see that this really has the potential to be the next standard. Keep up the good work, hopefully soon you guys will get seeking working and then I can dump ogm and avi for good. :)

[Joe999]

Yes! I'm heading off immediately to get that new mplayer source code a'compilin away! Big thanks to everyone involved, and especially Moritz for letting us Linux users join in the fun right at the beginning!

[Malow]

A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.

Movie RoseRed, xvid+mp3 (ogg works too for me) in 3 XCD... with Media Player Classic...

very good, just wait for more apps to play with it...

Malow

[Mosu]

Originally posted by Joe999
Big thanks to everyone involved, and especially Moritz for letting us Linux users join in the fun right at the beginning!

You're welcome :) A request: if anyone finds bugs with the MPlayer demuxer please join us on irc.corecodec.org, channel #matroska - that way I'll be able to fix those bugs pretty fast.

[Liisachan]

MKV is awesome! :cool:

I tested more than 10 patterns.
For instance, I transmuxed a 175.00MB AVI (XviD+MP3 CBR) into MKV, with direct stream copy; the result is -- 174.09MB!
Yes, in this case MKV is smaller by almost 1.0MB in 175MB.
And it plays decently w TCMP RC3 Matroska, and almost perfectly w WMP.
This is only one example among many!

TCMP RC3 Matroska edition is also nice.
It has KaxDemux.dll which it will register by itself,
so you dont have to use regsvr32,
just install TCMP, then MKV MKA playback support will be ready.
You can even associate the extensions .mkv and .mka.
After that, an MKV file plays by just clicking its icon.

http://www.corecoded.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=79&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

In my env, there will be always jitter for first 2-3 seconds,
when I try to replay MKVs w TCMP. ( After this 2-3 sec period,
everything is cool.) Windows Media Player doesnt have this prob.
Media Player Classic doesnt work for MKV, in my env,
tho it does play MKA audio nicely.

All in all, I d say this is really promising:
filesize compactness (smaller than AVI/ogm), Unicode-based subs (I heard it already works on Linux), wide variety of Codecs it can accept, etc. etc...

For the time being, OGM is much more stable, so I think I m going to go on using OGM at least for a while.
But seeminly MKV can do everything that OGM can do, and more...
Plus, unlike OGM, it is open-source. It is really promising, I think :)


Correction:
Media Player Classic worked too for MKV

[Babeinternational]

Champagne again !!!
Works for me too (DivX 5.0.5 with MP3 CBR 160:"Hi, Mr Anderson. Surprised to see me ?":-D).
Let's get our hands dirty...there are things to do.
Btw, the new design of VDubMod is pretty cool (I always wondered why OGM and AVI were separated), it is so simple with this Stream List and Save As all together.
Now we can use Matroska, and still wait for something (chapter ans subs support); I love waiting for something (masochism ?).

[killingspree]

Congrats!
just succesfully did a avi - mkv conversation with vdubmod 1.5.1.1a.
video: divx 5.02
audio: 5.1 ac3
playback in BSPlayer works flawlessly. only thing: loading takes pretty long. should it?

thanks for this great new container. i see a bright future for it!

steVe

[Teegedeck]

Finally a clean solution for B-frames and VBR-MP3! Thanks to all of the matroska-team!:)

It works fine with BSPlayer. I'm gonna use matroska from now on, confident that this great project will flourish and attract more developers to code features yet missing.

Celebration time!

[alky]

nice... ogm vs mkv:
709.343KB vs 706.584KB

but since searching does not work during playback on windows not useable for me...

[BlackSun]

Originally posted by alky
nice... ogm vs mkv:
709.343KB vs 706.584KB

but since searching does not work during playback on windows not useable for me...

we're working on that atm !

[Mosu]

Please remember, guys, that we've called it a beta release, and that's what it still is. You might want to wait a bit before converting your big illegal movie archive ;)

And yes, the DirectShow filter has the highest priority at the moment. It won't take long until seeking has been implemented.

[oddball]

Question: Apart from filesizes and being open source, what other advantages does this have over OGM?

Also when used in conjunction with XCD does it offer any extra error protection?

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by oddball Question: Apart from filesizes and being open source, what other advantages does this have over OGM? Also when used in conjunction with XCD does it offer any extra error protection?

You might want to read here : http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=304910#post304910 . This will certainly answer a lot of your questions ....

[oddball]

The following works and does not work for me.

Divx4.x and AC3 audio plays fine although the video and audio initially judder and jerk for the first few seconds of playback. Occurs in all players.

Xvid and OGG do not playback at all in any players including The Core Media Player (Tried BSPlayer, Zoom Player, WMP etc).

Can provide sample video and audio file from problem movie for you to mux and test for yourself.

I hope these issues get resolved soon.

EDIT: OK it's definitely something to do with OGG. I tried the same video file but muxed in the AC3 audio from the other video that works fine and it played back the MKV fine even with the AC3 being from an entirely different movie file.

I've tried a few other movies that use OGG audio and they have the same problem. MKV's load up but display a black screen and will not play at all. I am using OggDS0995 and OGM's playback perfectly.

About to try an MP3 audio movie.

P.S. I also use ffdshow latest (24/4) as playback for the vide portion although this should not have an effect. Will disable it just in case though.

EDIT: EDIT:

OK MP3 plays fine but also has the slow startup and jerky video/audio in the first few seconds of playback.

OGG audio is a no go. Absolutely refuses to play any MKV's with OGG audio in them. Bummer.

[Animaniac]

I remuxed an OGM with XviD video and Ogg Vorbis audio to MKV and it works fine...

[alky]

Originally posted by Mosu
Please remember, guys, that we've called it a beta release, and that's what it still is. You might want to wait a bit before converting your big illegal movie archive ;)



uhh the "i" word ... :P
i make my own tv rips with my hauppauge pvr...

[Perplx]

I can't get ffvfw version of huffyuv to work, but thats not really important.

[Atamido]

I noticed that it seems to cut off the last second of audio, and maybe the video. I have a clip that is maybe 30 seconds long that is DIV3, and vbr MP3 that I use to test all sorts of things. The very last thing in it is Peter Gibbons saying "Yeah, I guess it was." That is cut off when playing the MKV in mplayer2.

[outlyer]

It's great to see this. Congratulations guys!!

I'm eager to start beta-testing (after some time of alpha-testing ;))

[robUx4]

Yes there is some data missing at the beggining and the end with the DSF. We are working on the spaghetti code of the DSF to improve it. We have already corrected the jerky beggining.

[oddball]

Any idea why I cannot play any MKV's with OGG audio in them?

[Atamido]

Originally posted by oddball
Any idea why I cannot play any MKV's with OGG audio in them?
The OggDS filter is only marginaly better than the current Matroska filter, aka not very good. The problem is that the OggDS filters were thrown together by one guy who didn't release source or documentation, and has disappeared from the face of the earth. (I think Emmett has him locked in his basement) There has also not been an update to this code in a very long time. This wouldn't be an issue at all if Xiph would just put out an Ogg and Vorbis DirectShow filter. But that is a whole different issue that you don't want to get me started on.

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by oddball
Any idea why I cannot play any MKV's with OGG audio in them?
Hum ... did we tell you that you need Tobias' OggDS filter to play Vorbis with matroska ? You have it installed ?

[nikthebak]

I'm having similar problems with XviD video + Vorbis audio in them. The players just freeze up when loading the Matroska file.

I have installed OggDS0995.

Edit:

It's definetely an Ogg issue. The same video file with VBR MP3 audio works flawlessly. Using recent VDubMod to mux the files.

[ChristianHJW]

Nik, is it possible that you could upload a sample file somewhere, so we can have a look whats wrong ?

[nexus]

I have the same as
nikthebak: I muxed a xvid video and two ogg audio streams. File plays fine until I seek or change to the other audio stream. Then it freezes and if I hit pause and then play again the player crashes. Its MediaPlayerClassic v6.4.4.2
I can upload a sample file on monday if it helps.

The good news: the file 3MBs smaller than the ogm (698 instead of 701MB)

--
nexus

[Gooop]

xvid + 2 ogg files on 1 XCD works fine for me in mplayerc 6.442, bsplayer and TCMP. As nexus I can't switch the audio streams, but the file plays fine (video and first audio stream) if I don't try to switch.
thanks for your great work !
I can't wait for the new direct show filter :)

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by Gooop I can't wait for the new direct show filter :) .. we will maybe release a new, better version today :) ...

[murattttt]

I have tried matroska just with small audio clips with VBR mp3 for consideration.
It is true that it is space efficient even to ignore an interleaving factor before encoding files.
I had the clip of 1:30 minutes long with
929.480 bytes of VBR mp3 audio
8.966.144 bytes of avi divx 4.11 ( I know it's old )
And the final size is 9.876.517 bytes
In the windows explorer normally the sum of those two files is 11.040.456 bytes
I found this vert promising. I had such a small file and I can still take advantage of space efficiency, plus the scurity that I won't have headaches with lip movements ( desynchronisation ).

I may even start encoding straightly to matroska after now. Though would I get into trouble with my recent mkv files with the forthcoming directshow filters, or is it guaranteed that they are past compatible?
( Are these words sufficient to express my problem? )
And do I run into severe problems if I just make them as XCD with *.dat file extension and burn as usual?
Edit: I have already done an XCD with 810 MBs of video+audio with divx 504 and ogg. It just plays good except the jerkiness in the beginning and of course the file seeking problem ( with MPC - didn't test with other players except WMP 6.4.09 )

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by murattttt Though would I get into trouble with my recent mkv files with the forthcoming directshow filters, or is it guaranteed that they are past compatible?

You can safely use all MKV creation tools to make your movies. All files are 100% spec compliant, the current problems are only DirectShow filter related. A good proof for that is that all files created with VdubMod play fine and with perfect seeking under Linux, using Mosu's excellent mplayer patch ;) ....

[robUx4]

Actually there is a problem with the mpa2mka tool and maybe wav2mka too (not spec compliant). But for video the tools are spec compliant. So it's just a matter of developping the DSF and they will always play.

[spyder]

WARNING!

I thought you should all know that the mpa2mka tool and all related tools like mpa2mka-gui and the wav counterparts are NOT spec compliant. We are working to fix this. Please be patient.

Meanwhile, I have a first version of the CDL for TCMP working. It currently just displays a blank tab in the media properties and calls says that the title of every file opened is "MOOOOO! - Matroska Rocks." :)

Spyder

[oddball]

As stated. I am using Tobias OggDS0995.exe and no MKV's will play with OGG audio in them.

I really would like to see this issue resolved somehow or it will be pointless for me to use Matroska.

[spyder]

Vorbis works fine here. Can you tell us a bit more about the file. Like resolution and codec for video, and bitrate, samplerate, and channels for the audio.

[Animaniac]

Maybe other filters like SubtitDS are hijacking the filter graph. Vorbis audio works fine here as well.

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by oddball As stated. I am using Tobias OggDS0995.exe and no MKV's will play with OGG audio in them. I really would like to see this issue resolved somehow or it will be pointless for me to use Matroska. ... how is your filter graph in Graphedit looking ??

[nexus]

Thanx for the new DSFilter (v0.3.1). It works fine (xViD + ogg). However seeking doesn't work and if I switch to the second audio stream there is no sound. After all the player doesn't crash any more. Get seeking and multiple audio streams work in DSFilter and this is my new standard container. :-)

--
nexus

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by nexus Get seeking and multiple audio streams work in DSFilter and this is my new standard container. :-)--
nexus .. i take your word, this is exactly our plan :) ! We had a file with 20 audio streams working fine in DirectShow today, but unfortunately all 20 were playing same time :D .. LOL .

What we need now is a powerfull stream switcher, else we will have the same problems as OGM, being it cant play different audio stream types. Blacksun found out that maybe the Morgan Stream Switcher sources will be relased soon, that would be an ideal basis i guess.

[Liisachan]

i tried DSF 0.3.1.

I experienced some jitter w 0.3.0 esp, for the first 2-3 secs,
but this problem is fixed in 0.3.1
Playback is really smooth now.

There should be still a long way to go (seeking ability, subs suport etc.) but this is really promising...

Honestly I didnt expect Matroska would be this nice at this stage--the first public beta. This is already practical, save seeking.

[Gooop]

just a small tip for audio stream switching : on my computer if I play an mkv file (xvid + 2ogg) in media player classic it plays the first audio stream. If I load the same file in bsplayer, it plays the second audio stream...
It's ok guys you can stop working right now, everything's fine :D

[zyrill]

Originally posted by ChristianHJW
What we need now is a powerfull stream switcher, else we will have the same problems as OGM, being it cant play different audio stream types.
sorry for interrupting but OGM actually CAN contain 2 audio-streams and you'll be able to switch between them without any difficulties using DSfilter...
hm... forget it - i know now what you mean by different streams...

[oddball]

OK here is a screencap of my Graphedit filters when trying to play an MKV file with OGG audio in it.

http://www.oddball.nildram.co.uk/graph.jpg

Also here is a test clip that is 5.78MB in size made from an OGM I have. I have tried several different OGM's and just muxing an avi and ogg file too with the same results. If it plays for you then it has to be something in my setup. But what?

http://www.oddball.nildram.co.uk/test.mkv

[zyrill]

your setup seems to be erratic - i'll post a screenie of what a graphedit-graph looks like on my system. i just converted an ogm including divx, ogg and chapters to mkv (divx 5.0.4 with OGG vorbis - is about 6mb smaller than the original ogm-file).
http://mitglied.lycos.de/zyrill/graph.gif