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Old 30th April 2003, 23:11   #1  |  Link
ChristianHJW
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Matroska open source A/V container format officially released

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/down...mux-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

Last edited by ChristianHJW; 30th April 2003 at 23:20.
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Old 30th April 2003, 23:19   #2  |  Link
avih
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congrats
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Old 30th April 2003, 23:21   #3  |  Link
robUx4
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thanx
It took a lot of time but now it's here (to stay) and working
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Old 1st May 2003, 00:24   #4  |  Link
Ookami
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Thanks.

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Old 1st May 2003, 00:34   #5  |  Link
BlackSun
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big thanks to the matroska team, who worked as a team and was so nice with their PC while debugging (yeah I lost my motherboard, cdburner and soundcard) Moo.
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Old 1st May 2003, 02:09   #6  |  Link
Doobie
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There you have it from a reliable source. Using matroska can destroy your motherboard, CD burner, and sound card.
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Old 1st May 2003, 02:12   #7  |  Link
Rasi
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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
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Old 1st May 2003, 03:31   #8  |  Link
BoNz1
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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.
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Old 1st May 2003, 03:35   #9  |  Link
Joe999
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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!
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Old 1st May 2003, 06:00   #10  |  Link
Malow
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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...

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Old 1st May 2003, 09:41   #11  |  Link
Mosu
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Quote:
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.
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Old 1st May 2003, 09:45   #12  |  Link
Liisachan
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Awesome

MKV is awesome!

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...rder=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

[edit]
Correction:
Media Player Classic worked too for MKV
[/edit]

Last edited by Liisachan; 1st May 2003 at 09:55.
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Old 1st May 2003, 10:00   #13  |  Link
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Good news indeed...

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 ?).
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Old 1st May 2003, 12:03   #14  |  Link
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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
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Old 1st May 2003, 14:10   #15  |  Link
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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!
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Old 1st May 2003, 15:09   #16  |  Link
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nice... ogm vs mkv:
709.343KB vs 706.584KB

but since searching does not work during playback on windows not useable for me...
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Old 1st May 2003, 15:40   #17  |  Link
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Quote:
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 !
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Old 1st May 2003, 15:54   #18  |  Link
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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.
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Old 1st May 2003, 16:35   #19  |  Link
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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?
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Old 1st May 2003, 17:05   #20  |  Link
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Quote:
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.ph...910#post304910 . This will certainly answer a lot of your questions ....
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