Matroska public alpha release date : 1st May 2003

[ssjkakaroto]

thx a lot for this container m8s :cool: i've been waiting since the days when divx.com forums were hot (Christian even had a guide on how to create a mp3 file using headac3he LOL)
now it can only get better :D
just one thing, will matroska be able to support different subtitle formats like ass, sub or any new format that pops up just like it is supposed to support any new codecs that appear?

[Animaniac]

Originally posted by crusty
Yeah !! New toyz !!:D :D

EDIT: Erm....how and where do you install the directshow filter ?
There's just a dll, nothing else.

Run... -> cmd
regsvr32.exe "C:\location of dll\kaxdemux.dll"

to unregister
regsvr32.exe /u kaxdemux.dll

[midiguy]

hey.. umm. where do I put the DLL?

[Animaniac]

Originally posted by midiguy
hey.. umm. where do I put the DLL?

Anywhere really. Just use the above registering command.

[midiguy]

got ya, thanks.

well, I got it to work. It has some bugs that need working out. In the beginning of playback, the audio starts but it seems the video is fixed on one frame. then it seems to skip a bunch of frames, then speed up a little, until it "catches up", from then on the file will playback okay. really good though for an early public beta! I can't wait for everything to be worked it, and for it to become a usable container format!

[nutshell]

when I muxed an ogm to a mkv there were 2 small problems:
1. when seeking (in mplayer of course :) ) the player wouldn't jump to key-frames
2. the file had the "seek-freeze-frames" (sometimes if you're seeking through an ogm you get to frames where the seeking seems to hang, it just doesn't go on, you have to jump in a bigger step (backwards) or wait for the frame to pass (forewards) to go on)
When I converted the video to avi and the audio to mka before muxing both to a mkv both issues disappeard

(small) feature request:
AFAICSFYS (as far as I could see from your specs) you define the aspect ratio via display-width/height - would it be possible to get an option for setting the two in mkvtools and/or vdubmod. I have a number of files with non-square-pixels and it would be easier to set the correct aspect-ratio once in the file than every time I play them.
/me is lazy :D

Great work!

[ssjkakaroto]

you can't seek with the current filter yet...

[Rasi]

thats why he said mplayer... he is on linux :P

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by nutshell
AFAICSFYS (as far as I could see from your specs) you define the aspect ratio via display-width/height - would it be possible to get an option for setting the two in mkvtools and/or vdubmod. I have a number of files with non-square-pixels and it would be easier to set the correct aspect-ratio once in the file than every time I play them.
/me is lazy :D . Great work!

Yes, this feature is planned, but it seems we have to pack a resizing filter into the DirectShow parser, although we are not completely sure about that ... maybe we can do without, we'll have to consult a few experst to find out how the MPEG container is handling this, as it works even with simple players such as WMP 6.4 ... BTW, spyder will link TCMP and matroska fully soon, using the TCMP CDL ;) .... maybe this will give some first AR support ...

[robUx4]

Yes, the AR might require a hack (so either probably every player will have to handle it their own way). It's also impossible to set it now simply because this is the first version of the tools and library. There are many many improvements planned based on the specs.

Things will get better with time, but it's already in usable state :)

[crusty]

I muxed an avi (divx 5.05 EKG modulated) with the corresponding AC3 track into matroska.
But when I tried to play it in wmp the sound is all screwed.
It sounds as if it's trying to decode to spdif, but I use ac filter 0.68b and I've set it to stereo out.
Haven't tried anything else yet, it was late at night and my eyes where begging for some rest.

[mikeson]

@all Matroska devels:

Great work, guys! Keep it coming, but I'm already charmed. :)

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by crusty I muxed an avi (divx 5.05 EKG modulated) with the corresponding AC3 track into matroska.
But when I tried to play it in wmp the sound is all screwed.
It sounds as if it's trying to decode to spdif, but I use ac filter 0.68b and I've set it to stereo out.
Haven't tried anything else yet, it was late at night and my eyes where begging for some rest.

@crusty : can you try to play the file in Graphedit and send us a screenshot of the playback graph ? ( email : matroska-devel at freelists.org )

[Animaniac]

mpa2mka-wxgui v0.1.3 (same with mpa2mka which was tagged as "BAD") creates MKA files that stutter when MP3 files with CBR <160Kbps are used. (Stuttering becomes slower as bitrate increases.) 256Kbps CBR works fine. 320Kbps MP3s are rendered unplayable (i.e. silent). VBR MP3s work fine. I didn't know where to post this bug so here it is.

Edit: Files were played back with kaxdemux.dll 0.3.1. kaxdemux.dll 0.3.0 produced the same results.

[spyder]

mpa2mka is broken ATM. We recently changed the way libmatroska handles the timecodes and the code for mpa2mka is outdated a bit. It gives the library the time in milliseconds when it needs nanoseconds. :)

Please be patient until this problem can be resolved...tonight hopefully ;)

Spyder

[Animaniac]

Originally posted by spyder
mpa2mka is broken ATM. We recently changed the way libmatroska handles the timecodes and the code for mpa2mka is outdated a bit. It gives the library the time in milliseconds when it needs nanoseconds. :)

Please be patient until this problem can be resolved...tonight hopefully ;)

Spyder

Ok. Sounds great.

I've made a bunch or Windows XP Registry keys that make .mka and .mkv files behave (with WMP9) like normal audio and video files respectively, (i.e. shell actions, nice icon, recognized in WMP9 open dialog box, etc.). There's also a key for .mkv to generate thumbnails in the thumbnail view in XP. However, the dsfilter doesn't seem to want to work with it as of yet. (In my case ffdshow came up (with the correct video info), hung around for awhile, and didn't produce a thumbnail.) This should work in the future though... I hope. These worked fine on my computer, use at your own risk. >.< Enjoy. (Attachment needs to be approved.)

[robUx4]

Well done Animaniac. We might ask you for these when everything works fine :)
The DSF right now has some deadlock problems. We are working on fixing it. That may be the cause of all known problems so far. (seeking is just a feature not coded yet).

For mpa2mka, it as been renamed as BAD because it produces spec NOT compliant files. So I can't guarantee future playback of files produced with these tools. These tools will be back to normal as soon as it is corrected.

For the 0.3.1 DSF it fixes the jerky start and missing frames at the end. You can also pause a file and play it multiple times, but still not Stop it.

[BlackSun]

ok, file approved. For obscur reasons the mod panel is slooooooooooow :(

[unplugged]

I'm curious :), when hex-viewing a mastroska video file internally I see index-like data (sequences by ~16 bytes) at beginning of file and one huge index at end of file, this last is about 2 Mb long with 1h:40m video file (700 MB).
What does contain the data at end of file?
(I guess that seek data is only for keyframes as VirtualDubMod says, and guess they are placed at beginning...)

I have read (give a look) the specs at matroska.org, but only certain parts was clear for me (at least for me). I loved that "graphical" scheme made previously for MCF, that was very important for global readability.

Thanks.

P.S.: hope that this great format will be locked soon (no further changes), now I feel this as first priority. Good work.

[robUx4]

All the features already implemented are locked. That means all files created now will always meet the specs (as long as they follow the current specs).

The thing you see at the beggining is the Meta Seek header that store the location of Level1 elements (Tracks, Clusters, Tags, Cues, etc). And the big thing at the end is the Cue entry that contains the location and timecode of all keyframes (depending on how you configure the Cue data in VDubMod). That will be used for super fast seeking in the file (supported soon in the DirectShow filter).

[filewalker]

I muxed 1 AVI/ 2 Ogg Audio/ 2 SRT ( ASCII )subtitels into MKV container although it's not really supported by the current DSF v. 0.3.1.

I believe in your hard work and I want to use MKV to store my movies from now, but I have a question:

Will my .mkv file (with these 3 file formats:AVI/Ogg/Srt) be specs compliant in the future and playable with future DSF ?
Or should we wait till USF is supported from both DSF and VDmod (because of possible changes in the specs)?
In other words, can we mux .srt (ASCII) subtitels into MKV without doubt that it's supported in the future?


PS.
The .srt subtitle is now displayed (using DirectVobSub 2.23) but there is a delay to the audio...but I know it's just the second DSF(and I know that it's not mentioned that it works now)...and, as someone said, the next DSF is coming soon!:)

Cu filewalker :)

[ChristianHJW]

SRT subs can be stored in matroska and the current text subs implementation of both mkvmerger ( Linux ) and VdubMod are already specs compliant.

Depending on the fonts the 2 codec IDs

'S_TEXT/ASCII'

or

'S_TEXT/UTF8'

may be used by the muxing application.

[crusty]

@crusty : can you try to play the file in Graphedit and send us a screenshot of the playback graph ?

Sorry, I already deleted the file from which it came. I don't have the hard disk space right now to do some testing, but later on I will certainly take a look at matroska again.

[spyder]

Good, because the filter is actually stabilizing now...no more crashes for me :)

[robUx4]

New Release

We have just released a new much much improved DirectShow filter v0.4.0 that you can find on http://www.matroska.org/announce.html. The new packaged of tools is tagged as the "Iris release".

It's no more in alpha stage, but in beta now. And there is no known problems for the moment.

As it's not using ASync_Reader anymore, it's not possible to use it with XCD. But we plan to use ASync_Reader again later.

[Gaia]

Sorry i am afraid this new dsfilter doesn't seem to work under Win98se. Unistalled and reinstalled it several times but it seems my system can't find it. I just get "corrupt file or missing filters".

Previous version worked fine.

Plus there's some strange uninstalling problems too.

[robUx4]

Originally posted by Gaia
Sorry i am afraid this new dsfilter doesn't seem to work under Win98se. Unistalled and reinstalled it several times but it seems my system can't find it.

Previous version worked fine.

The matroska files has to be named .mka or .mkv to be recognized by DirectShow. And you have to run the install.bat from the location you put the mkxds.dll !... And keep this file at this place.

Otherwise, you can download TCMP which can associate mka and mkv files to the player.

[Gaia]

Originally posted by robUx4
The matroska files has to be named .mka or .mkv to be recognized by DirectShow. And you have to run the install.bat from the location you put the mkxds.dll !... And keep this file at this place.

Otherwise, you can download TCMP which can associate mka and mkv files to the player.

I did ofcourse all that! Just checked my matroska file with VDubMod and everything is fine so the file is not corrupted.

[robUx4]

Maybe it doesn't work with Win98SE, yes. But I really doubt it. I can't test it here. So anyone else could confirm ?

Update: It might be because it's a Unicode DLL which may not be supported under (old) Win98SE.

We might try to make a non-Unicode DLL soon.

[Gaia]

I tried few things and it seems that Win98SE(updated everything) can't register this filter.

[haibane]

I just tried the new version, seek is now possible, but when not hit on a key frame, only the moving parts of the picture will change and the rest of picture will remain intact until reach the next key frame, the picture below is encode with xvid, I haven't tried other codecs yet. I don't know is this an expected problem.

http://skywalker1.mysitespace.com/Snap1.jpg

[robUx4]

This is known & expected. I'm not even sure it needs to be changed.

If you seek at location 10.523s do you expect playback to start at 13s where there is a keyframeor at 10.520s where there is a frame ? I prefer the first one even though it's not a keyframe. After all at 13s I will also have what have the other behaviour... Just take it like a free extra :)

The only real pb is that when you ask to seek at 10.523s you might start at 10.029s because that's where the Cluster starts, and not the closest frame you requested. This needs to be corrected, and it's planed.

[dsmith]

Oh, I'd say it most definitely needs to be changed. Not in where it starts (if I hit 10.523, it should start at the frame closest to that timecode), but it should definitely give me a full, proper frame. As it is, if I pause and then seek to four or five other positions, I get the frame I stopped on, plus the difference coding for each of the other places I stopped, leaving me with a chunk of blocky ugliness only vaguely resembling anything in the original video. Testing on a couple other files seems to indicate that as long as the new seek position is in a new key frame segment it will generate a proper picture, but if it's in the same key frame segment it will just keep layering on changes without regenerating what the frame should actually look like. This is problematic for videos with long keyframe intervals, and for seeking in a small time-frame.

Also of interest: I downloaded the test2.avi from somewhere (don't remember where) along with the accompanying .mkv version. It's the 5 second clip of a French(?) commercial with the ducks and popcorn. (also regenerated the .mkv from scratch myself to be sure) This doesn't seem to want to provide any image for any seek attempt other than the first frame. In addition, if you start it playing and then seek to different points a number of times, it will eventually crash the application (WMP9 and ZoomPlayer3 tested). Pausing and restarting multiple times also seems to crash the player. I wasn't able to get other videos encoded as .mkv's to crash the players.

--
David

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by dsmith Oh, I'd say it most definitely needs to be changed.

I guess a user configurable behaviour would be optimal, in the filter properties window ...

[dsmith]

User configurable? Could you please explain why you'd want to keep that behavior? No offense intended, but I honestly cannot think of why you'd want to allow that behavior to remain in place. At best, it gives the impression of a poorly done, unfinished (and potentially more unsavory terms) product.

Edit: Rereading, I see there's potential confusion about what each of us is talking about. Just to be clear, I'm referring to the inability to generate a complete frame if you seek multiple frames inside a single keyframe segment. Whether the final seekpoint is as close to the point you picked as possible or the nearest/next keyframe is less of an issue, and I can see that being configurable.

--
David

[JimiK]

Maybe I'm wrong here, but imho this is the problem that OggDS has. It seeks to the next keyframe and if you want to go back and your step is not large enough, you hang at that keyframe. But that leeds me to the question: how does Avi do that. Is there something wrong with it too? I, for my part, was always perfectly happy the way Avi is seeking (o.k., it's kind of slow).
Best regards,
JimiK

[ssjkakaroto]

hi there i just took a look over http://matroska.sourceforge.net/overhead.html
but i didn't get much how should i calculate the overhead for a matroska stream. does anyone know how to calculate it for xvid(b-frames on)+ogg when using the default settings of vdubmod?

tia

[robUx4]

Originally posted by ssjkakaroto
hi there i just took a look over http://matroska.sourceforge.net/overhead.html
but i didn't get much how should i calculate the overhead for a matroska stream. does anyone know how to calculate it for xvid(b-frames on)+ogg when using the default settings of vdubmod?

tia

This is page may be outdated, because we use even less overhead :)
The formula to calculate the overhead is a bit complicated because all sizes in the format are variable. I might try to make a simple document for that soon.

edit: please add a Tracker request for that on CoreCodec.org (http://corecodec.org/projects/matroska/).

[robUx4]

Originally posted by JimiK
Maybe I'm wrong here, but imho this is the problem that OggDS has. It seeks to the next keyframe and if you want to go back and your step is not large enough, you hang at that keyframe. But that leeds me to the question: how does Avi do that. Is there something wrong with it too? I, for my part, was always perfectly happy the way Avi is seeking (o.k., it's kind of slow).
Best regards,
JimiK

Finally someone get the idea of what I said ;)
In fact AVI may not have this problem because it can send the reference frame to the decoder and then the B or P frame. But that's actually not how DS would work, it would display the keyframe (first in the flushed stream). So being AVI, OGM or matroska we are all equal ! Don't expect something revolutionary because this is DirectShow anyway. So either you'll have a friendly display but not accurate on the location in the file, or the opposite. (that will be the option in the filter).

[GIR]

I'm running Win98se and WMP 6.4 and the new filter does not work for me either :( I registered it manually, that worked fine said it succeeded, however a quick search of the registry finds no references to "mkxds.dll" when attempting to play *.mkv files in WMP 6.4 the following error occurs: "Class not registered (Error=80040154)"

[spyder]

I think the reason that AVI seeking is slow is that when you seek to a specified timecode it jumps to the closest keyframe before the point you seek to and then decodes from there, only presenting the frame requested. This insures that the frame will be correctly displayed. This is what I think the Matroska DSF should try to do also. Sure seeking will be a little slower but the quality of playback will be 10 times better. For example, has anyone tried playing divx 3.11 files with this filter. I remember when the trend was to use 1 keyframe in a file ;) that made for interesting movies with no seeking to be allowed. I wonder if our filter will even play these after seek. Maybe if the frames are decoded anyway seeking actually works in them now...hmmm...i need to go test. :)

[Calculon]

Is there currently a way to get a variable framerate matroska file? I created two matroska files in vdubmod, one 23.976 fps, the other 29.97. The problem is vdubmod won't let me join them because of the difference in framerate. :(

[robUx4]

Originally posted by Calculon
Is there currently a way to get a variable framerate matroska file? I created two matroska files in vdubmod, one 23.976 fps, the other 29.97. The problem is vdubmod won't let me join them because of the difference in framerate. :(

Matroska allow any track to be of any variable rate, but VDubMod may not be able to do that for matroska yet. It should tell you it's impossible when saving (to AVI), not loading.

[spyder]

Currently there is no way to do this...Though it really should become a feature of VDubMod oneday. The filter should have no problem playing this type of file.

[robUx4]

Originally posted by spyder
I think the reason that AVI seeking is slow is that when you seek to a specified timecode it jumps to the closest keyframe before the point you seek to and then decodes from there, only presenting the frame requested. This insures that the frame will be correctly displayed. This is what I think the Matroska DSF should try to do also. Sure seeking will be a little slower but the quality of playback will be 10 times better. For example, has anyone tried playing divx 3.11 files with this filter. I remember when the trend was to use 1 keyframe in a file ;) that made for interesting movies with no seeking to be allowed. I wonder if our filter will even play these after seek. Maybe if the frames are decoded anyway seeking actually works in them now...hmmm...i need to go test. :)

If some files were encoded like that I don't think you'll have playback pb with the current filter. On scene change a P frame is SO different than the previous (P) frame that most of the image will be fully indepedant, and no more display pbs. If we wanted to check the first keyframe that would be too slow.

BTW, a P frame depends on a P frame, so I doubt in AVI it's parsing all the frames until the one you want to display (at the end of the movie).

[Atamido]

It should not be too long before we have a simple tool to append two tracks to each other, despite the content.

[filewalker]

I muxed 3 SRT subtitles in a MKV file. Display is fine...and the chosen subtitle starts without:) moving the video backwards or forwards slightly(like it was with OGM) and cycling through subtitles works with DirectVobsub2.23, too.Thanks!:)
TCMP CDL plugin (v1.0), a plugin to read more data in matroska files when you use The Core Media Player.
What do you mean with "more data"? I'm just curious...;)
Does that mean that the DSF works better or fluently with this plugin(in combination with TCMP),or what?

Cu filewalker :)

[Animaniac]

Originally posted by filewalker
I muxed 3 SRT subtitles in a MKV file. Display is fine...and the chosen subtitle starts without:) moving the video backwards or forwards slightly(like it was with OGM) and cycling through subtitles works with DirectVobsub2.23, too.Thanks!:)

Did you have to create a filter graph with GraphEdit to get DVobSub to load? The Auto-Loading version doesn't load for me.

Also how are some of you getting multiple audio streams to isolate and switch?

Thanks. ^_^

[filewalker]

DVobSub loads without a special filter graph in my case.
But I generally use the Zoomplayer.I registered DVobSub in ZP... and it could be, but I'm not sure, that I increased the MERIT to a high level (to 00800002)some time ago.So DVobSub loads everytime I open any Media File.

AFAIK multiple Audio stream support/switching isn't supported by the current DSF...so, if I'm right :rolleyes:, we have to wait some time till audio switching'll be supported.:)

Cu filewalker

[robUx4]

Originally posted by filewalker
What do you mean with "more data"? I'm just curious...;)
Does that mean that the DSF works better or fluently with this plugin(in combination with TCMP),or what?

For example it can read all the track info in the file and display (not possible with the DSF now). It should also be able to use the Aspect Ratio settings in the matroska file to display a proper video window. But I haven't tested it yet.

You should also be able to edit many kind of tags in the file too (meta infos).

All these little neat features that makes it better to use.