Need advice OGM or MKV ?

[SonicBlow]

hello everyone !
i'm a newbie here in this field....
i used to encode movie using avi format,
but both omg and mkv both offer turn on / off subtitle also dual audio .....
so i'm interested to learn encoding but due to lack of time , do please advice me which one is better ogm or mkv ? and where to get the required software to encode to ogm / mkv from dvd source ..
Thanks for anyhelp

[Koepi]

Welcome on board, SonicBlow. Please make sure to re-read the forum rules. You violated our famous "Do not ask what's best"-rule.

Next to that, you should read at least the guides on www.doom9.org before asking such a question.

Both mkv and OGM are capable of what you want to do with it. If you want to use vorbis for audio I suggest you use the OGM container, for mp3/ac3/aac I suggest you use mkv.

The software you require you can find on the download-section of www.doom9.org.

Cheers
Koepi

[SonicBlow]

ouch ....
dunno if such regulation exist,
used to be a sticky rules on each sub forum on others site's forum ...

okay then have to search for these materials myself ...
Thanks for the the advice

[quake74]

I hope I'm not going against the rules by answering...

It looks to me like OGM is not being extended or worked on at all, a new splitter popped up recently, but that's about it. MKV is actively developed (they are adding menus nowadays I think). Interesting links for comparisons (they are all quite in favor of MKV but most of the facts are true and you can draw your own conclusions):

http://ld-anime.faireal.net/guide/matroska-en

http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~noe/Video-Zeug/AVIMux%20GUI/en_overhead_comparison.html

http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~noe/Video-Zeug/containers.pdf

Rant: I used OGM for quite a bit because of http://dvdtoogm.divx-digest.com/ which is the *only* automation tool which supports more than 2 audio streams (neither (Auto)GK nor MeGui nor DVX do, I think http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/ supports them under Linux). If only the damn DVDtoMKV would came out already...

[unskinnyboy]

@SonicBlow, Your requirements are not clear. If all you want are subtitles which can be turned on/off + dual audio, then you can use either OGM or MKV, it doesn't matter. Both supports it. I am not sure why Koepi pointed out OGM for Vorbis audio, since I have extensively used OGG-in-MKV with satisfactory results. So I can safely say that MKV works just fine whatever the audio format is in.

Now regarding subtitles, you haven't mentioned what format your subtitles are. However it might be useful to have a look at this portion of Alex Noe's container comparison documentation:

3.5 Subtitles
Selectable subtitles work in all 3 containers. However, OGM cannot do Unicode subtitles, meaning that combining french and russian will be hard. Even just rendering french subtitles on a russian Windows installation or vice-versa can be problematic. Also, OGM only works with SRT subtitles, whereas AVI additionally can be used with SSA and Matroska with SSA and VobSub subtitles.

As AVI files are limited to 100 streams, you might claim that this is a real limit, but it will suffice usually. Especially, DVDs can only contain 8 audio tracks and 32 subtitle tracks, so this limit is non-existant when making backups of DVD-Video discs.

However, Standalone MPEG4 players that can read AVI files will usually not be able to handle selectable subtitles in AVI files. Standalone players reading OGM or MKV are as easy to find as a needle in a haystack.
Also to add that in my personal experience - muxing overhead of OGM is more than that of MKV's. You should be able to draw your own conclusions now, or if you are looking for more specific uses for your container, then let us know.

[Chris Benoit]

Can someone be brave enough to point the differences between the 3 containers plz(OGM-MKV-MP4)?

[bond]

:search:
this has been discussed that often already