What's wrong with MOV?

[Atomsk]

While reading this forum I've come to see how the AVI container has lots of problems and formats such as MKV and OGM are supposed to replace it. What I'm curious about is what's wrong with QuickTime's MOV format? Does it also have some serious technical limitations or do these projects just exist to provide a free/opensouce alternative?

[Neo Neko]

Short answer is yes. Personally to me there is nothing wrong with the apple quicktime format. But the format is only part of the equation. In order to play alot of their content you need the apple quicktime player which is about second in infamy to realplayer. Both are making strides to correct past transgressions though. That is a big barrier to entry for most OSS devs though. I think they see new formats as new opportunities which will not have old stigmas keeping some away.

Personally if someone would write a good quicktime interface seperate and indepandant from apple quicktime. One that would allow us to store whatever we want in a mov and play it back without quicktime I would be verry interested. Verry interested. Wether or not many know it they by and large are beginning to use quicktime already. The MP4 file format is quite similar for good reason. :P

So yes Matroska etc are re-inventing the wheel in some ways. But they do have their unique features. And most importantly are free in general from years of bad blood and history.

[Atomsk]

If MP4 is just a subset of MOV, then in theory couldn't one just use those tools? Or is it just based on Quicktime but different enough so that the two aren't compatible?

OpenQuicktime (http://www.openquicktime.org/) looked promising until I noticed it hasn't been touched in over a year.

I wish I could help but I'm more of a hardware/low-level guy and wouldn't know where to start when it comes to implementing a DirectShow filter. Guess I'll just add this to the list of projects I would like to contribute to if I only had the time and talent.

[bond]

Originally posted by Atomsk
[If MP4 is just a subset of MOV, then in theory couldn't one just use those tools? Or is it just based on Quicktime but different enough so that the two aren't compatible?.mp4 is not a subset of .mov and they are not compatible, still the creators of .mp4 took .mov as a starting point, but thats not enough to get compatibility

[ChristianHJW]

MOV itself would be a fine container for most needs, no doubt.

But as we had been pointing out many times now, the container alone is nothing. To become a viable alternative to AVI in combination with VfW or DirectShow, a good container needs a suitable multimedia framework around it, allowing developers to write their own codecs using the framework. The benefit of this is clear, the codec developer can concentrate on what he can do best ( i.e. the compression itself ), and doesnt have to care about other stream types ( audio / video / subs / menues ) as the multi-purpose container will normally allow him to use any other supported stream type with his codec. In addition to that, a video editor sitting on top of the framework will allow him to edit his stuff easily, as long as his codec will comply with the rules of the framework.

One of the best examples how powerful such a 'combination' can be is DivX / MP3 / AVI / Virtualdub. The DivX codec was nothing but a hacked M$ MPEG4V3 VCM codec, coded by M$ devs for whatever reason. AVI was certainly never intended to become the preferred container for the upcoming MPEG4 standard, but the 'real' MPEG4 developers had to face serious competition from this 'bastard' solution because almost everything a normal user would want from a new video compression standard was already there :
- a good and stable editor, Virtualdub
- a nice audio compression format ( at that time ), MP3
- perfect playback support, thanks to DirectShow's VFW compatibility
- various, nice hacks around the VfW standard to allow subs and other stuff with it
The rest is history. It seems strange that so called 'MPEG4 standalone players' had support for AVI long before they could read even simple MP4 files :( .....

Back to subject :

The only reason why MOV was not accepted on any other platform than Mac's, is the either missing ( Linux ) or unacceptable implementation ( Windows ) of the multimedia platform supporting it. OpenQuicktime was a nice movement in the right direction, but to be honest we would have been very surprised if these guys had really succeeded to re-code the complete Quicktime framework with just a handful of part-time coders, with big similarities to our small project.

If Apple decided to make the source-code of Quicktime opensource, and gave it a nice BSD or L-GPL license, now that was a different story. They would be able to hurt a couple of other projects and companies with that move, RealNetworks certainly being amongst them. Real invested a lot of time and effort to create an open multimedia framework with Helix, and guess why that is ;) ....

Christian
matroska project admin