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/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