OGM is not dead - oggds now in xiph CVS

[kxy]

Thanks much to Tobias for donating his DirectShow filters to Xiph.org!

You will find the code from Tobias in the 'oggds' module of CVS. This code represents the 0.9.9.3 version of the filters, which is not quite what the current version was. Apparently Tobias was in the middle of some sweeping changes and was not able to recover the new version for us.

In any case, I encourage everyone interested to play around with them. They are BSD licensed and should make a great starting point to finish a fully function set of filters for the Windows platform.

Jack Moffitt

[Koepi]

Just got a mail 1 minute before your post in this forum where Tobias wrote about that :)

I'm sorry that I had to nag Tobias with that(well, one mail asking about releasing the sources isn't really nagging), but now really noone can complain - OGM is alive and kickin'!

Koepi

[bond]

wow real great news!!!

hopefully someone will continue Tobias' work (matroska team fasten your seatbelt ;) )...

[iago]

Yep, that's good news! :)

[Animaniac]

Sweet!!!

[Ghim]

It's really something good to hear...

There's a lot of great programmers here... Let's hope one of them will take this project and continue it !!!

[Atamido]

Originally posted by Koepi
OGM is alive and kickin'! From hell's mouth I stab at thee. Die OGM, die!! :devil:

Just kidding. But seriously, this is good news. Competition is good. The fact that OGM can do chapters is one of the driving reasons to hurry up and get chapters working in Matroska. We don't want to completely pass up OGM in a week and have nothing to compete against. Maybe we should pull Toff away from Matroska and have him focus on fixing OggDS. ;)

[Garfield]

That is such a good news, i hope Gabest was told about it :D

[avih]

at last :) great news indeed.

[Animaniac]

Originally posted by Garfield
That is such a good news, i hope Gabest was told about it :D

Haha, ditto. I wonder if he'd be willing to work on the filters.

[BoNz1]

Great news, good to see that all of tobias' work and the work of everyone that tested and helped out with ogm is going to be put to good use by the people at xiph.

[robUx4]

Originally posted by BoNz1
Great news, good to see that all of tobias' work and the work of everyone that tested and helped out with ogm is going to be put to good use by the people at xiph.

Mmm, that's not what the announcement says... Xiph haven't assigned anyone to it. And I doubt they will ever do. So they hope someone else will do their work. It will not be dead if someone take the responsability to support it and make it evolve.

But it's good that the situation is finally clear(er).

[BoNz1]

I would hope development would continue, at the very least it seems they are interested. You are right whether or not it actually becomes the container that hold theora, I guess time only will tell.

[ChristianHJW]

I should maybe not comment this thread here, but this is what i liked to say :

I personally see OGMs future as a supported format from Xiph, or not. I may be wrong here, but this is my opinion. Just think of what happens if libogg is no longer supported, and OGM become incompatible with oggfile, which is incorportating Theora and Ogg handling in general.

Monty has recently stated on #vorbis that IHO Tobias has done a great job to stick to the Ogg specs as close as possible, as far as he can tell. Maybe only the 'mapping' of the DivX codec had to change.

Now i bet every sum that Monty

- has no detailled insight how the VCM codec mapping is actually working in OGM
- doesnt know what a BITMAPINFOHEADER is, nor a VIDEOINFOHEADER
- has not really considered how such Windows centric structs can be generated on Linux, his preferred OS ( ask Mosu, he knows about it very well )
- will die a sudden and hard death, presumable from a heart attack, once he finds out that Tobias is fully depending on the information that DirectShow is giving the OggDS muxer filter ( again, BITMAPINFOHEADER and VIDEOINFOHEADER ) to be able to initialize the codec on playback

He maybe has a feeling that this is the case now, thats why he said the 'codec mapping may change', but guys .... if he does change that, all your existing OGM may be supported for playback, but unevitable become out of spec for the future .....

Just my 2 cents, not here to start a flame war ( and i havent mentioned our stuff !! )

Christian

[Liisachan]

this may sound selfish, but personally I would love _any_ container as long as I can softsub in SSA :) :) Yep, that s what I want to do.

To all the godlike developers here: plz support embedded SSA in OGM! And make it unicode-base! That's all what I want....^^; It was once my dream. I gave up once. I m glad to know that it was not dead after all

[Atamido]

Oops, I misread Liisachan's comments. I have some comments later about putting SSA in OGM.

[Affar]

Why have you been so slow in macking these operation?
I have the impression that it´s beacuse Matroska has appeared
I would like to know that had happened if this didn't exist

:confused: :confused:

[robUx4]

Originally posted by Pamel
then insert the 'Matroska splitter' filter

Plz Pamel, no such advertising. We don't want to start any war do we ? I know you're from Texas, but...

[Animaniac]

I'm pretty sure Liisachan knows how to use the Matroska Muxer just as well as the rest of us... She did write a Matroska article on her page, and did some early SSA testing with said filter. -_-;;

Anyways, to bring this back on topic, I think it's only a matter of time now for OGM to match some of Matroska's features--just as Matroska is working to match (and out do) mature OGM features.

[Koepi]

Sorry pals, but could you discuss matroska related topics in a matroska thread instead of hijacking _the_ OGM revival thread? This is rude of you.

But this just proves my oppinion about certain people right again :(

Koepi

[Animaniac]

Originally posted by Koepi
Sorry pals, but could you discuss matroska related topics in a matroska thread instead of hijacking _the_ OGM revival thread? This is rude of you.

But this just proves my oppinion about certain people right again :(

Koepi

I agree that there should be less Matroska advocating across the message board, but when discussing the present and future of OGM, it's difficult not to talk about the compeition. Each format is going to push the other to become better, and ignoring that fact would be a terrible mistake. This would be like discussing the merits and flaws of Codec A without comparing it to rival B (, C, etc.). A better analogy would be not talking about OGM in AVI related threads when it was just beginning to compete with AVI, but that definately did not happen. If anything, OGM advocates should welcome the competition, and help make the format better. Furthermore, forbidding discussion of the competition shows a lack of faith in OGM.

[Liisachan]

Yep, what I meant was "It would be great if I could embed unicode-based SSA in (New) Ogg format" and I hope it ll come true sooner or later now that the codes are open

I know I can do that with other formats like AVI/MKV, but it has nothing to do with my post. That was a feature request for the "new" OGM :)

and, altho it is true that i made a small page to play with MKV, I also made big pages for OGM in 6 languages (http://ld-anime.faireal.net/guide/ogm), "Lazy Man's Guide to Ogg Media (OGM Files)"

Like I said, I ll be a huge fan of _any_ format with which i can do what i want to. I'd say "OGM is not dead" should be good news for everyone including ppl who are developing another format. For instance, if OggDs.dll is updated decently, it is possible that they dont have to work hard for CoreVorbis.ax ; I know this is a delicate topic, but I think, well, basically, there s nothing wrong with having more than one options,
and it is natural that we are looking forward to the new Ogg format which might come with Ogg Theora, as Ogg Vorbis is really nice. (tho, technically, a container and a codec is different)

Go, fish!

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by Koepi But this just proves my oppinion about certain people right again :( Koepi

I personally apologize for this behaviour from our team members Koepi. I dont know what was driving Pamel, Steve was even dropping an email to our MLs about how to behave here in this thread, and even then he was posting about our container again, which really shouldnt have happened at all.

Maybe Pamel was surprised to see Liisachan requesting SSA support in OGM, i guess we were all too certain that the whole anime world was just waiting for us, but Liisachan is right if she as a user wants to have the choice, and we have to accept that.

Again, sorry .....

[bilu]

Imagine if the XVID crowd starts flooding DivX forums... it would be as justified as what you matroska guys have been doing in this thread :rolleyes:

Please redirect users to your threads as much as you can, so you can leave space for the competition to grow ;)


Best regards,
Bilu

[corigan]

I for one love OGM, and love the news. I'm glad tobias has given oggds to the open source community for further advancement, cheers tobais.

[avih]

it's not a black and white world. i don't think mkv discussions should be forbidden on this thread, but mkv supporters should apply some common sense before advertising (not talking about a specific post). that's it. be nice and considering to eachother and the rest will come along.

imho, having 2 able 'competing' containers will only do well for our community.

nevertheless, i still think that this thread should keep the focus on ogg/ogm.

[Hiro2k]

A bit back on topic.

We should make a quick checklist of all the features that are broken in OGM right now, and get to work on those ASAP.

Muxing AC3 and Ogg together
Supporting the <color> tag in SubtitleDS

Keep adding guys

[Liisachan]

Originally posted by Hiro2k
A bit back on topic.

We should make a quick checklist of all the features that are broken in OGM right now, and get to work on those ASAP.

Muxing AC3 and Ogg together
Supporting the <color> tag in SubtitleDS

Keep adding guys

Something that I want to see in the new OGM (I am not a developer, so some of my wishes may be too much or might be silly)

SUBS:
1. <font> tags in SRT(not only color, but fontsize etc)
2. positioning like ASS's {\an}
3. "subs collisions" so that 2+ ppl can speak at the same time in the movie (today's OGM don't accept SRTs which include overlapped data in timeline)
4. UTF-8 support; without which, OGM has no future about i18n/m17n. Many minor languages don't have their proper code pages, but have all Code Points needed scattered in Unicode table. For example, I happened to get a script in Tatar (a minor language spoken in a part of Russia), and was disappointed to find I can't put Tatar subs as SRT in today's OGM no matter what. (Hence I softsubbed in Tatar using another format.)
5. SSA/ASS and coming USF

AUDIO:
1. AAC (already ok?)
2. MP+
3. FLAC

CHAPTERS:
Which charset should we use in Chapters? I guess UTF-8, while SRT doesn't accept UTF-8. This should be unified.

PS. I do love .OGX import/export--one of the OggMux 0.9.5's new features; that is really convenient when you want to mux the same files again and again for some reasons (correcting typos in an srt etc)--especially, with OGX, you have to type about chapters only once. Really cool.

[Animaniac]

Originally posted by Hiro2k
A bit back on topic.

We should make a quick checklist of all the features that are broken in OGM right now, and get to work on those ASAP.

Muxing AC3 and Ogg together
Supporting the <color> tag in SubtitleDS

Keep adding guys

I'm pretty sure the audio problems are because there's a built-in splitter, since the splitter needs to output the same channels/bit/frequency, therefore 2 channel Vorbis with AC3 is not allowed. A swichter-less splitter (as found with all other splitters) is what we need. At least that's what I think.

[zulu]

Chapters:
The chapter seeking algo seems to be of by one.
Chapter keyframes have to be inserted one frame delayed in order that ogm dsf finds them.

[DKDIB]

My wishlist:
1- spilt Ogm/Ogm spilter, Vorbis encoder & Vorbis decoder in 3 filters (CoreVorbis is wonderful, so I want to use it also for Ogm/Ogg ;));
2- Unicode;
3- AAC;
4- RealVideo/Audio.

[Koepi]

The SubDS sources are there already as well? I thought Tobias wanted to release a new version first, 15times faster as the old version due to mmx optimizations :)

Before you create the todo-lists please take into consideration that the sources are from OggDS 0.9.9.3 - not the latest ones :-/ So fixes which are necessary for that version should make it into the lists as well.

and OT again: I have nothing against competition. In fact I like it. But abusing every possibility to advertise matroska ("you don't need ogm, use matroska, it can already do it.") - especially when competition arises in the special announcement/revival thread - is misplaced.
I didn't forbid anything btw., I don't know how that rumour came up. I wrote that this kind of behaviour is rude. Please rethink your positions concerning me forbidding discussions. I _asked_ for something. that's completely different.

Regards
Koepi

[robUx4]

Originally posted by Koepi
and OT again: I have nothing against competition. In fact I like it. But abusing every possibility to advertise matroska ("you don't need ogm, use matroska, it can already do it.") - especially when competition arises in the special announcement/revival thread - is misplaced.

Koepi, this matroska vs OGM has been going for a while. We first contacted Xiph a long time ago to join our efforts/knowledges but they simply wanted to push OGG so it didn't end well. What happens here is what happened in many places. The latest was on a Gentoo forum (http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=63722) where you can see Monty saying that noone needs matroska when there is OGG, in a matroska related thread. I'm really tired of all this shit and I would like everyone to work instead of bashing the other.

Now if anybody want to compare things, you can reach me to know why I think in many cases matroska is the way to go. ;)

[Koepi]

I am not monty.
Monty even dislikes OGM (in the meantime it seems it is really just the extension that bugs him - the implementation seems to be correct.)

The OGM implementation has nothing to do with monty and/or xiph (ok, it's hosted there now. but noone of their crew will work on it, that's for sure.) I had my troubles with xiph as well (nice flamewar with emmett.)

So don't mix up things here please.

OGM is started by Tobias (-> going back where this thread belongs). It's coded by one from us. _He_ never mentioned anywhere we wouldn't need matroska. I didn't write that either (I only wrote that OGM suffices for my needs for now and I may have no use for it ;) ) OggMux will be renamed and support matroska as well. But you only keep bashing at OGM - which is very weak and I loose some of my interest in supporting matroska.

Could we please concentrate on the topic of this thread now and assemble a todo-list (and maybe find someone interested/with a little spare time in coding the OggDS filters further)?

Thanks
Koepi

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by Koepi
Could we please concentrate on the topic of this thread now and assemble a todo-list (and maybe find someone interested/with a little spare time in coding the OggDS filters further)? Thanks Koepi

Good idea. Lets start with SSA ... how are you going to handle overlapping timecodes in OGM ? Any ideas here ?

[bond]

i am voting for discussing ogm development in this thread only and create an own "ogm vs. matroska" thread to discuss the differences, advantages, disadvantages (this would be much clearer, fairer and would make our lives (and reading) much easier)

now back to topic:

missing changes between 0.9.9.3 and 0.9.9.5 (from tobias' hp):

- Changed everything to Unicode(tm) to ensure that other languages are handled correctly.
- Support for Vorbisgain tags
- The OggSplitter supports now the IAMMediaContent interface to pass some tags like "TITLE" a.s.o. to the player.
- The tray icon shows now also the title instead of "Ogg DSF"
- Fixed some problems with tray icon, which caused some players to crash when closeing
- Fixed vorbis.dll (the project on the Xiph CVS has an error, which results in vorbisenc to be compiled in vorbis.dll and to get an unusual big size)
- Support for 639-2 codes in the language tag. The corresponding LCID is then reported to the player. ( E.g. English[eng] )

[robUx4]

Well, let me express my deep apologies for what happened here. I don't like it as much as you, Koepi (who's currently the only active person on the OGM side).

I explained to all our team why we should calm down on such issues just when this thread started. Apparently it was not enough (especially for Pamel). So I tried to be a bit more convincing on our IRC channel. I hope this kind of things will be the past now.

Of course we both (OGM and Matroska ppl) get our heads hot quickly when something in our field is mentioned. And we would like our work to be appreciated and used as much as possible. But it should not be agressive or by trying to steal users on the back. But it should be only done when comparison is involved not in OGM or matroska specific threads... Let's make the competition creative, not destructive.

[bond]

Originally posted by DKDIB
My wishlist:
3- AAC;
4- RealVideo/Audio. i just tried muxing aac and rm into .ogm with tobias' multiplexer and aac seems to work without any problem :)
read more here (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=57327)

realmedia doesnt seem to work (as gabest already wrote)

[Koepi]

AAC should work if you write headerless aac-streams (which option got added to the latest aacmachine-releases). I wrote about that some time ago?

Bond, can you try using OggMux as well please and post any errors occuring here?

Regards
Koepi

[bond]

Originally posted by Koepi
AAC should work if you write headerless aac-streams (which option got added to the latest aacmachine-releases). I wrote about that some time ago?i used .mp4 files (splitted by 3ivx) from nero as input
i guess 3ivx doesnt pass the header to the ogm multiplexer...

Bond, can you try using OggMux as well please and post any errors occuring here?failed to render input aac! i tried aacs from nero, faac and aacenc (of course i never used any option to be headerless ;) )

[Koepi]

Thanks bond! :)

Ok, seems like it's necessary to track that down. If you use "render media file" in graphedit with your nero generated aac, which works in your example, which graph gets built? I'm sorry, I don't have the time to play around with aac and thus am dependant on your info :)

if the error message is really "failed to render input .aac" then there's a bug in the OggMux GUI, not sending the proper file name.

Regards
Koepi

[bond]

Originally posted by Koepi
Ok, seems like it's necessary to track that down. If you use "render media file" in graphedit with your nero generated aac, which works in your example, which graph gets built? I'm sorry, I don't have the time to play around with aac and thus am dependant on your info :)no problem :)
no graph can be built (i guess because there isnt something like an "aac splitter")!
when muxing in graphedit i used
input .mp4 -> 3ivx splitter -> ogg multiplexer -> output .ogm

if the error message is really "failed to render input .aac" then there's a bug in the OggMux GUI, not sending the proper file name.sorry my fault
the error message of course mentions the used file name

[el00343]

having just read the thread, all I can say is that this is great news indeed! So much for the "death of OGM".

[DAvenger]

Originally posted by el00343
having just read the thread, all I can say is that this is great news indeed! So much for the "death of OGM".

Let's hope we will see some progress on the above mentioned ogm issues :rolleyes: Competition is vital ;)

[Atamido]

Originally posted by ChristianHJW
Lets start with SSA ... how are you going to handle overlapping timecodes in OGM ? Any ideas here ? I don't think that this will be to hard. In Matroska we strip the timecodes/duration out of the subs and use them at the container level. In OGM it would probably be easy to just leave them in, or create a field specifically for duration. Then you could store an event at the appropriate timecode, and using that timecode, and the stored duration, you should be able to reconstruct the original timecodes. I think at that point it just becomes a matter of the support for those structures being added to VSFILTER.

I'm a bit rusty with the OGM structure, can anyone tell me if there would be a problem with that?

A bigger question in my mind would be how to use forward referencing frames in OGM. I think that currently MPEG-4 codecs are using packed bit-stream only, but there should be a way in OGM to store the frames individually. Any ideas for this?

@Koepi: Chill. I misunderstood Liisachan's comment.

[unmei]

oh i'm glad to see the storm in here seems a over ;D

i don't know much about the philosophy in OGM but i would understand if the concept was not that radical to attempt to break with old bad avi habits. I think at the moment it is not a big downpoint not to support native (err how you call it ? independent frame packing ?) as all the current codecs support the packed bitstream. This should not mean i would oppose someone implementing it, but i guess it's a rather big work someone has to find time for first.

There are sure a lot of small improvements easier coded that could give the end user more obvious instant improvment in "usage easeness" (the mentioned extended audio and subtitle format support for example)
à la "simple" things first...

[Atamido]

One other thing. OGM is currently using a "samplerate" that is set the the fps of the video. So, then the "granulepos" becomes the frame number. You would probably want to change this to use a default behaviour of using milliseconds as the samplerate, and then the timecode in ms for the granulepos.

This would allow vfr video as the default config. (and I'm not refering to dropping drupeframes that has recieved so much attention recently) I don't THINK this would break anything, but I'm not that familiar with how the DS filter works.

[Stux]

Packed Bitstream is not MPEG-4 compliant.

[Atamido]

Oops, I meant to say, "I think that currently MPEG-4 codecs are using packed bit-stream only in AVI". I would not be inclined to call packed bitstreams in AVI, MPEG-4 compliant. However, I have heard some compelling arguments for otherwise.

[DSPguru]

Cheers to Tobias !
i don't know about Xiph's plans, but it is vital that the following code will stay inside the OggDS sources :
if (vorbis_comment_query_count(&m_vc, "LWING_GAIN"))
{
m_bPostGain = true;
m_fPostGain = (float)atof(vorbis_comment_query(&m_vc, "LWING_GAIN", 0));
}

[pirata]

COMPETITION vs COLLABORATION

I don't think competition is good in the free source world. It is indeed good in the closed-source, but that's outside this forum.

I am one of those just waiting for the new matroska features to be added. I don't know about you, but I still cannot mux several, different audio streams in a mkv file. There are no chapters at all. And on top of that, I see people saying competition will be good. What will competition do? Shall it lead the devs to squeeze even more work hours out of their precious spare time? Will it force them to sleep less to do more? Don't think so. I rather think they already do all they can.

I do not agree with those who celebrate seeing the developer community going divided again, pushing 2 different containers, both of them still unable to do completely what we want. Both of them having a long way before they fulfill our needs.

The advent of Matroska had brought developers together. Some of them creating the perfect editor, others developing the best player, and others working hard on the directshow filters. We all have waited a long time to see this happen. We all hoped more and more manpower would join them, so that things would become speedier. That's the nice way about free source code.

Now, other people, who really seem to have spare time to do some nice coding, decide they want to create their own container. Maybe they like specially how OGM and OGG were conceived, and do not like the way matroska was. Or maybe they do it just for kicks. Either way, it is precious coding power that goes through the window. Again.

Hey people, why don't we create our own Linux? I vote for the new name: Xunil!

[defeatist]

I agree with pirata. I humbly request that the Matroska team maintain focus on their goal of entirely replacing AVI with MKV, a goal which OGM never could and IMHO never can attain. I even more humbly request the same focus of the community.

For as long as OGM has been available I have tried to avoid AVI in its favor. My primary reason for doing so has been my preference for OggVorbis, which I consider far superior to MP3. In addition of crouse is the fact that OGM's features far surpass those of AVI. In these ways I have been biased towards OGM. However, I cannot deny the inexplicable problems I have had with OGM in almost every scenario. EVERY OGM I have muxed and played has displayed the following general problems:

1) Loss of position when changing playback speed in any player
2) Loss of all frames until next keyframe when CPU usage peaks
3) Heavy jitter when background tasks use x CPU % (x is always greater for AVI & MKV)
4) Inability to seek to any non-keyframe in a reasonable time

More specifically, my results with AC3 in OGM have been uniformly horrible. I experience seemingly random sync (i.e. a/v sync fluctuates unpredictably) during playback. I do not experience this problem with the same XVID/AC3 tracks in MKV or AVI. I realize some have had better results, but that very fact displays OGM's greatest problem: its unpredictability of performance on any given system.

I realize all of the above problems can be attributed to the DirectShow filters and not the container itself. However, all the versions I have used display the same problems, and I doubt any forthcoming filters (if they ever appear) will solve them. It is my poorly educated but fairly experienced suspicion that OGM is, by its very nature and specifications, unsuited for audio-video containment.

The OGG container that Tobias modified was not designed to hold video data. As far as I know, OGM is essentially a hack (admittedly an educated, clean, and legal one) of an audio-oriented container. It's very foundation contradicts its application via OGM. Furthermore, Tobias never intended its widespread usage (and it's arguable that such usage does not exist).

Matroska, on the other hand, was conceived and has been designed to be THE replacement for AVI, which remains in usage by the vast majority of encoders. Its foundation is equal to its application. Its form fits its function.

I used to believe AVI was still prefered mostly because of ignorance of OGM's existance and of OggVorbis' superiority to MP3. Now, however, I suspect otherwise. Perhaps AVI prevails because its more educated users have found that OGM's weaknesses (eg. lack of predictability, support, development, and future-proofing) overcome its advantages (eg. support of chapters, oggtags, OggVorbis, streaming, multiple audio tracks). Obviously OGM has been used almost exclusively for dual-audio encodes because AVI cannot do so without a hack. Mode2-form2 burning is a similar scenario.

{suddenly I'm extremely famished.... [insert more subversion, er, _arguments_ here!]}

My overall point is that OGM has been a good temporary solution for AVI's shortcomings, but it will soon be completely replaced by a much more appropriate and future-proof container, Matroska. I believe it is in our best interests to focus our usage and support on one container. I'm simply too hungry to explain why.

Please forgive the poor construction of this argument and respond as if it were coherent. Thank you so much for your time! :)

[robUx4]

Thanx for these 2 tempered posts (very rare recently). I'm glad you both got the ideas behind matroska : make people work together, give the user what they need, replace other existing containers by keeping the advantage of each (AVI, VOB, MP4, OGM, RM, AAF and others).

Historically OGM has been here before matroska and thus already have a instaled based, some people who know well about it, etc. I don't think it will ever die. AFAIK, it was created to serve Tobias' personal needs. So I guess he'll keep on using it anyway, as for other people.

What will competition bring ? More knowledge in the basket. Each advance on one side can benefit to the other side (like all the framing of RealMedia files that Gabest reverse-engineered can be put in OGM too). And it's also stimulating for the devs (including myself). So you'll probably get things sooner that ETA and it should be better than "the competitor". Otherwise it's not worth it... On the other hand OGM and matroska are not built the same, they don't share the same foundations. One is designed for streaming (and only that), the other is designed for editability (?). We tried our best to make matroska as streamable as possible, while OGM has probably received the same treatment for editability. I personally think we did a better job of catching up and that's why I have always been confident about matroska's future, even before any code existed (which seemed to piss down-to-earth people at Xiph).

So let the real competition begin and we'll see who wins in the end (much bigger user base). It's not always the best technical solution that wins. So everything is possible.

[Koepi]

Ok, dunno where to start.

you convinced me.

I give up.

no ogm ever again.

use matroska.

it is sooooo much better and leaves no right for another format.

EDIT: just in case you didn't notice, this is sarcastic. Of course I don't give up but will help to make OGM even more usable as it is already!

[bb]

I use OGM. I don't use Matroska (at least not yet). Why?

Because OGM works great. And it has been available long before any other container format that could support Ogg Vorbis.

I will continue using OGM. And I hope development will continue.

bb

[robUx4]

Koepi, plz don't make things so black & white. Of course you're not going to have me tell you (or anyone else) that matroska doesn't compare so well to OGM (or anything else) because I worked to make it the "best possible" and think I (we) made it. On a technical side, I think all people that has worked on both OGM and matroska think the same (they'll say it themselves and probably not in this thread). But I still hope for you and the OGM community that you keep on improving it/fixing it. I also hope you'll find one or more developpers that know about containers and DirectShow to work on the filter. Don't count on Xiph for that...

After all, if we can convince people to leave AVI and use more modern alternatives (smaller, more reliable, more versatile, etc), we'll both win !

Edit: Now I think we've enough talked about matroska in this thread. I hope it will be the last instance...

[Nic]

Hmmmm, I do think OGM still deserves its place. From day one, it became popular and very easy to use. It had more of an impact than matroska has now. Im very glad the sources have been released, the fact they weren't is what stopped me using OGM.

I think instead of comparing matroska and OGM now though, this thread should just be about OGM. And what people deem to need fixing and adding, starting off with the small things and then getting to the big important ones.

So lets have no more comparing and instead use this thread to try and improve OGM. Because discussing the pros and cons will only inflame people.

Sound fair? :)

-Nic

[Koepi]

I'll try to collect a todo-list now.

OggDS:
- Muxing of audio formats: AC3, AAC (already ok - needs a splitter filter though [or must be a headerless file -> AACMachine can do that] more or less fixes for OggMux necessary), MP+, FLAC, RealVideo/Audio
- Support for additional subtitle formats and overlapping timecodes (more than one person speaking): SSA/ASS and coming USF (see SubDS filter's todo-list)
- charset should be UTF-8 (SRT doesn't accept UTF-8. This should be unified)
- Chapters: The chapter seeking algo seems to be of by one.
- Support for Vorbisgain tags ( -> LWIN_GAIN as well)
- Add support for IAMMediaContent interface to pass some tags like "TITLE" a.s.o. to the player
- Fix the tray icon to show also the title instead of "Ogg DSF"
- Fix some problems with tray icon, which cause some players to crash when closeing
- Fix vorbis.dll (the project on the Xiph CVS has an error, which results in vorbisenc to be compiled in vorbis.dll and to get an unusual big size)
- Add support for 639-2 codes in the language tag. The corresponding LCID is then reported to the player. ( E.g. English[eng] )
- Variable Framerate support
- (planned by Tobias: multilanguage chapter names - corresponding to the audio language choosen)

SubDS:
- <font> tags in SRT(not only color, but fontsize etc)
- positioning like ASS's {\an}
- "subs collisions" so that 2+ ppl can speak at the same time in the movie (today's OGM don't accept SRTs which include overlapped data in timeline)
- UTF-8 support; without which, OGM has no future about i18n/m17n. Many minor languages don't have their proper code pages, but have all Code Points needed scattered in Unicode table. For example, I happened to get a script in Tatar (a minor language spoken in a part of Russia), and was disappointed to find I can't put Tatar subs as SRT in today's OGM no matter what. (Hence I softsubbed in Tatar using another format.)
- SSA/ASS and coming USF

Keep suggestions coming, this is a first version of a todo-list only. I'll try to keep it updated - or maybe I'll start a new, clean thread where no strange comments are going to be made [I'd delete them there] ;)

Regards
Koepi

[b]EDIT: cleaned up the todo-lists a little.

[Nic]

"Fixed some problems with tray icon..."
Are the things that you've prefixed with "fixed", are they things you've just fixed. Or things that need fixing? :)

[DAvenger]

Originally posted by Nic
"Fixed some problems with tray icon..."
Are the things that you've prefixed with "fixed", are they things you've just fixed. Or things that need fixing? :)

:D

It's a changelog from 0.9.9.5 while the released source is only 0.9.9.3 :( So it is necessary to do these things once again :eek:

[bond]

Originally posted by Koepi
- AAC (already ok - needs a splitter filter though [or must be a headerless file -> AACMachine can do that])perhaps someone should talk to the mpeg4ip guys to add a "mp4/aac -> aac headerless" option to mp4creator, that would surely help...

- Variable Framerate supportgreat ;)

i for my side will support both containers as much as i can during development
(up to now i would choose matroska because it has smaller overheads and doesnt seem to be like an not officially supported (by xiph) hack. sorry, but this opinion can change of course)

very important for me will also be how well the containers will support xcd (error correction etc.)!

[hans-jürgen]

Originally posted by bond
perhaps someone should talk to the mpeg4ip guys to add a "mp4/aac -> aac headerless" option to mp4creator, that would surely help... faac.exe -r (see the help screen or the Wiki page for more)

[bond]

Originally posted by hans-jürgen
faac.exe -r (see the help screen or the Wiki page for more)ok, this is possible when someone encodes with faac or aacmachine but what about nero, quicktime, sorenson, etc... and what if someone doesnt encode the files by himself (for example buys them on itunes)?

a switch in mp4creator would solve all that issues...

[Koepi]

You can buy the sound of an already encoded movie on itunes or somewhere else? Now you got me, I didn't know that ;)

Let's please stay realistic: OGM is meant to be a container for something you encode yourself. So you have the choice of your encoding tools. AACMachine and faac support the necessary output (which I btw. didn't verify myself excessive btw., if someone with a dshow aac decoder could check that as well it would be nice).
In that case I don't see the problem to use the tool that delivers what you need. Specialy since those tools are freeware.

I'll clean up the todo-list in some minutes so it doesn't look like I'm already working on anything - it's unlikely that I code (much) for OggDS since I don't have the time like I had a year ago :(

Regards
Koepi

[bond]

Originally posted by Koepi
Let's please stay realistic: OGM is meant to be a container for something you encode yourself.encoding a soundtrack in quicktime or nero is VERY realistic (even more realistic than encoding with aacmachine or faac because of better quality (with or without sbr) and better multichannel support is coming for quicktime, available in nero (broken in aacmachine))

but nobody has to use .ogm ;)

EDIT1 : why not putting itunes downloaded music together with a selfmade clip into .ogm? that's not unrealistic although not widely done i guess

EDIT2: all we need is a mp4creator version that outputs headerless aacs, that's not much ;)

[Koepi]

Originally posted by bond
but nobody has to use .ogm ;)

I won't force you or anyone to use it. It's your choice. It's all about choices.

I didn't realize that nero's plugin delivers amazing quality. Maybe we need a tool to simply strip off the headers as pre-processing step. It would be possible to use within OggMux (like the delay-code). Or now with the OggDS sources, accept that kind of input directly and strip the headers there. But we need information about the file format for that. Damn. So much work for a single audio format.

But anyways, it's on the todo list. And that's not because I like joking, I think the list is realistic.

Koepi

[bond]

Originally posted by Koepi
I didn't realize that nero's plugin delivers amazing quality.according to rjamorim's last listening test @128 (results here (http://rarewares.hydrogenaudio.org/test/aac128test/results.html)) quicktime performed best, followed by nero, sorenson and aacmachine (these 3 were equal), faac was by far the worst (i wouldnt recommend using it at the moment.

and nero will support sbr technology in nero6 (will be released on 18 july) and for the next version of quicktime it is planned to inlcude multichannel encoding

Maybe we need a tool to simply strip off the headers as pre-processing step.that's what i am talking about all the time ;)
mp4creator (from mpeg4ip) now can already convert aac <-> mp4 and add different headers to the files (mpeg-2 oder 4), there just has to be a "remove header" function added

[Koepi]

Ah ok, sorry, then I misunderstood you. My apologies.

(I finally downloaded the OggDS sources from Xiph's CVS btw ;) they're really tiny...)

Regards
Koepi

[bond]

so the only big issue is to find someone who wants to continue tobis' work?

koepi, if you are willing to code a little bit perhaps it would be good if you want to open a sourceforge project as a start?

[outlyer]

any chance to add graphic subtitles to the todo list? png based subtitles would be nice, not huge and would save ocr for the lazy ones :D

[kxy]

SubtitDS will not work with b-frame.

[Animaniac]

In terms of subtitles, I'd really like to see Gabest's subtitle source filters used instead. I've had nothing but problems with SubTitDS which manages to always load itself on playback, and in turn conflict with VSFilter. SubTitDS also does not support YV12 and always converts it to YUV2. VSFilter can handle OGM subs without SubTitDS, so it would really be great to continue with Gabest's subtitle tools and just upgrade the mu'xer and the splitter. I'd also like to see the splitter to loose the stream switching, since it's what's preventing different audio streams using different channels/bits/frequency. Most modern players (read: MPC) have their own audio switching and OggDS's switching tends to conflict with such systems. Furthermore built-in stream switching goes against the DirectShow model of autonoumous filters that focus on one task. Another bug is that MatrixMixer does not link up with 6 channel outputs, only 2 channel outputs.

[Hiro2k]

Originally posted by outlyer
any chance to add graphic subtitles to the todo list? png based subtitles would be nice, not huge and would save ocr for the lazy ones :D

Or for those really messy subs that ask you in each sentence what a character is! *points at Eva!*

[Atamido]

A particular team of people were talking about using image subs, and one of the issues that came up was amount of processor usage required to decode an image. PNG take ALOT of processor time to decode. The result of using them for subtitles in video would likely result in a jerk in the video everytime a new subtitle needed to be displayed.

Mosu decided to try and use the original sub images and lightly compress them so that they took up less space. Decoding these takes very little, and so is good for video playback. You may want to look into the same thing for OGM.
Edit: I typed the wrong compression type originally. :(

[Nic]

One of the guys I worked with did the OGM support for VideoLan so ill see if I can rope him in. Ill take a look at the sources as well (although I know nothing about subtitles, so im not sure if i'd be much help there)

(recently split with my gf, so ive got so much time free now ;) )

-Nic

ps
For those who fear CVS but still want to look at the source to see how they could help:
http://nic.dnsalias.com/OggDS_src.zip

[outlyer]

Originally posted by Animaniac
In terms of subtitles, I'd really like to see Gabest's subtitle source filters used instead.
I agree, Gabest's are a much better option now.

[Koepi]

Unfortunately I'm not yet able to build that project, the .vcproj files are giving me a minor headache... ;)

We should support the mux'ing of subtitles from within the OggMuxer I'd say. As palyback filter there msot times gabest's filters are used - and the SubTitDS files aren't in the CVS anyways ;)

Regards
Koepi

[Animaniac]

Originally posted by Koepi
Unfortunately I'm not yet able to build that project, the .vcproj files are giving me a minor headache... ;)

We should support the mux'ing of subtitles from within the OggMuxer I'd say. As palyback filter there msot times gabest's filters are used - and the SubTitDS files aren't in the CVS anyways ;)

Regards
Koepi

Last I used OggMux, it required SubTitDS. Is that dependency still there?

Another additon to the list, the Ogg splitter should handle FLAC in Ogg so that it is compatible with CoreFLAC when it becomes availible.

Edit: Icecast support for Vorbis Streaming would also be nice.

[bond]

it would be also great to make the splitter compatible with corevorbis (dont know why it doesnt work now :confused: )

[Nic]

It doesn't work now (I think); Mainly because the corevorbis guys changed the GUID. I think the Ogg Splitter sends its first few packets of data to the vorbis decoder to set the decoder up. Which is a little bit of a hack. So I think your right; CoreVorbis and CoreAAC are on the menu ;)

-Nic

[DaveEL]

Originally posted by outlyer
any chance to add graphic subtitles to the todo list? png based subtitles would be nice, not huge and would save ocr for the lazy ones :D

Prehaps its best to keep with the xiph recomendations of MNG overlays in ogg for ogm http://wiki.xiph.org/MNGOverlay ?

DaveEL

[Belgabor]

Um, I might be wrong, but isnt mng png with animation features? Will that save any processor power?!?

[outlyer]

Um, I might be wrong, but isnt mng png with animation features?It is.

Will that save any processor power?!?I don't believe so; BTW I wonder if using PNG with a compression level 5, for example, would eat much resources.

[Nic]

http://nic.dnsalias.com/OggDSsrc_VC6.zip

Contains the source but with VC6 project files instead of .net ones. This should make it more accessible. You may need the Ogg SDK, Platform SDK and/or the DirectX 9 SDK to compile it.

I'm sure me and Koepi will keep you posted on developments :)

-Nic

[el00343]

Originally posted by Nic
http://nic.dnsalias.com/OggDSsrc_VC6.zip

Contains the source but with VC6 project files instead of .net ones. This should make it more accessible. You may need the Ogg SDK, Platform SDK and/or the DirectX 9 SDK to compile it.

I'm sure me and Koepi will keep you posted on developments :)

-Nic

Keep up the good work guys.The community will have a lot to thank you for.

[kilg0r3]

Since mkv currently has not that good error skipping capabilities, I#d be glad if ogm could be extended in a way as to carry rv9 video streams.

[bond]

Originally posted by Nic
I'm sure me and Koepi will keep you posted on developments :)so you both will work on .ogm?
would be great :)

[Nic]

Hopefully...although I know Koepi's busy. At present im just finishing off AAC support to Cyrius' OGMuxer.

-Nic

ps
LoL...Finished that. Now going to make OGMuxer into a nice DLL, then make a nice GUI to it. Thats part one I wanted done (Hope Cyrius doesn't mind, my coding style is disimilar to his...not sure if he'd want it merged back in with his source)

[bond]

great to hear that :)

[RadicalEd]

Originally posted by outlyer
It is.

Jasc has .mng labeled as "Animation Shop Animation". It would make sense if they were really just using animated png, but I wonder if they're the same format or not :\
I guess it's likely. Still animated png would be more appropriate than making it sound like a proprietary format.

[h9903209]

thx for everyone who is willing to continue development in ogm, as lots of encode nowadays use ogm, seems impossible to convert all to mkv again... and for oggDS todo list, I really want to improve the speed of searching to any non-keyframe.

If I uncheck "search to keyframe" in oggDS, it takes so much time to jump e.g. 5 seconds. Usually when I review anime which I already watch once, I would always jump in 2 or 5 seconds, but in oggDS the jump takes soooooo long! While if I check "search to keyframe", the jump would become unstable though fast, sometimes jump for >10 seconds even I just want to jump 2 seconds...

[zulu]

LoL...Finished that. Now going to make OGMuxer into a nice DLL, then make a nice GUI to it. Thats part one I wanted done (Hope Cyrius doesn't mind, my coding style is disimilar to his...not sure if he'd want it merged back in with his source)

Nooooooo! :eek:
Uhhmm...this is _exactly_ what i am working on atm.
Anyway, competition doesn't hurt... :D


zulu

[unmei]

originally posted by h9903209
seems impossible to convert all to mkv again

:D i dont think the idea is to convert the old files to new format. neither avi->ogm nor avi->mkv nor ogm<->mkv.
The only reason to do this would be if the old avis have desync issues or dont play anymore (like you had windoze, and now have linux and dont want to keep avi support).
IMHO the new containers are here to extend the possibilities for new encodes, not to repack your old collection (w00, i would hate that - copying tons of cds to harddrive, repack, burn again *shudder*)

[Nic]

@zulu: good! :) Its not competition is more choice for the user :)

@all: Does the OggDS Vorbis decoder work well? I could change it to work with CoreVorbis easily, but im not sure if its worth doing and possibly breaking something for someone else.

Any other bugs worth mentioning?

Cheers,
-Nic

[bond]

vorbis decoder seems to work but enabling the use of corevorbis (or any other decoder to come) would be great (it's all about choices ;) )

hm what about splitting the oggds.dll into 4 different files (decoder, encoder, splitter, muxer) dont know if this causes much work?

[Nic]

Hmmm. The way the Ogg Splitter does Vorbis initialisation now isn't good and not compatible with CoreVorbis. Does the normal tobias filter support multichannel well? I dont want to break anything by chance if there is no advantage...

I like the OggDS.DLL being one file. Makes it very complete and simple, almost tempted to put a version of CoreAAC in there as well ;)
(Splitting it to seperate files would be very easy....whats other peoples opinion. I want to keep things as straight forward as possible)

-Nic

[Animaniac]

I'd really like to see the CoreVorbis be used in place of the OggDS Vorbis decoder. I'd also like to see the switcher turned into a separate filter and/or the "enable all streams" option to work correctly, since it breaks consistency when used with audio switching filter in MPC. I really think the separate filter route is better since users can have greater choice.

Edit: Would it be possible to "fix" the Ogg demu'xer to work with CoreVorbis? I've had trouble with multichannel using the OggDS Vorbis filter. This filter also doesn't like linking with Matrix Mixer for 6 channel streams, but likes linking with 2 channel streams for some odd reason.

[Suiryc]

Originally posted by Nic
Hopefully...although I know Koepi's busy. At present im just finishing off AAC support to Cyrius' OGMuxer.

-Nic

ps
LoL...Finished that. Now going to make OGMuxer into a nice DLL, then make a nice GUI to it. Thats part one I wanted done (Hope Cyrius doesn't mind, my coding style is disimilar to his...not sure if he'd want it merged back in with his source)
lol
You are welcomed.

I don't really have a coding style (that was my first real program ... and I picked some coding things here and there ... and I have to admit some parts are really crappy ^^;).

I know making a DLL out of it may interest some people here (and the GUI too).
Some times ago I wanted to turn it into a set of DLLs that could be used to mux and/or split more easily but I had a lot of work on VirtualDubMod so I gave up.

[Nic]

Animaniac: thanx, that gives me reason to make it work with corevorbis instead. Ill do that tonight, ill look into the stream switcher

@cyrius: cheers! It works well, I had to make some minor changes (you couldn't add anything after the stream_header passed to the packetizer constructor, etc). Ill release the source probably tomorrow or over the weekend and you can see what Ive done :)

Cheers,
-Nic

[bond]

Originally posted by Animaniac
I really think the separate filter route is better since users can have greater choice.yup that was my thought too because

why installing a specific vorbis decoder if you want to use another one (for what reason ever)
and why installing an vorbis encoder or an ogm muxer filter if you dont really need one?
and if it is possible to split the switcher too i would do so (i am using the morgan one for a long time now)

i know i am no programmer but i think it would be really a good idea to open a "ogm" project on sourceforge (like gabest' guliverkli project) and then release 4 (or 5) different sub-project-files (which then can also be updated independently from the others)

so the files and sources are kept together but every user can choose only what he really needs (and if there are components available from other sources which can do more or better than the one from oggds.dll, there would be no need to work on this specific part just to keep the whole package up-to-date, but to concentrate on the more important other unfinished parts)

but that's just my opinion ;)

[outlyer]

Originally posted by RadicalEd
Jasc has .mng labeled as "Animation Shop Animation". It would make sense if they were really just using animated png, but I wonder if they're the same format or not :\It's "officially" Multiple-image Network Graphics, and is developed around PNG, although probably it's way different now.
http://libpng.org/pub/mng/
P.S.: I'm going too off-topic with this post and will stop going farther ;)

[Suiryc]

Originally posted by Nic
@cyrius: cheers! It works well, I had to make some minor changes (you couldn't add anything after the stream_header passed to the packetizer constructor, etc). Ill release the source probably tomorrow or over the weekend and you can see what Ive done :)

Yeah I didn't know that Tobias was adding the extra bytes of WAVEFORMATEX after the stream_header at that time.
I will change that in VirtualDubMod as well.

[Nic]

Good, Its needed for CoreAAC (those two initialisation bytes). Also when writing to the fourcc in stream_header, you may not want to do a strcpy as its only 4 bytes big and it will append a 0. Better to use strncpy(...,...,4); But apart from those very minor things its great :) Works really well... :)

Cheers,
-Nic

[Animaniac]

Originally posted by bond


i know i am no programmer but i think it would be really a good idea to open a "ogm" project on sourceforge (like gabest' guliverkli project) and then release 4 (or 5) different sub-project-files (which then can also be updated independently from the others)


Great idea! I second it! :D

[bond]

i hope we two are not the only one who like the idea :D

[Liisachan]

I like that idea too :)
Especailly if xiph ppl are not going to work on OGM...

and my concern is, what's going on about SubTitDS ?
isn't it still open-source?

Improving OggDS would be nice, but it would be great if SubTitDS is also in the OGM project.

As a side note, I suppose more than 90% of the end-users in CJK areas are unhappy with Today's OGM because they can not use their languages in SRT correctly. At least in Japan, almost all users are just ignoring today's OGM's softsub feature, because it doesn't work anyway. From what I gathered, some ppl from Central Europe are feeling the same way.

Altho today's OGM may be already cool for ppl in the "Western Europe and US" locale, I hope OGM will be unicode-based so we can use various languages in subs stably and seamlessly (without manually switching Code Pages) and all the users in the world will be happy :)

[Nic]

Hmmm, I have a thing where I think as soon as a project gets on SourceSafe, it becomes such a hassle to update and dies (SAVE_OE anyone? ;)). People just stop bothering, so im going to do that after sometime and when there's real interest and we actually need a CVS. For now ill build something on mine or koepi's site that will work in a similar way.....still not sure about splitting the filters into their component parts. Might keep it as it is, but not add anything more to it (?) The less change for now the better.

As for the unicode support. I see this is a big issue for Ogg, that will be on my list soon. But ill need you guys help, because I know nothing about subtitles (nor the problems involved in non-western alphabets).

Cheers,
-Nic

ps
Thru the power of wireless networking, I can finally do this from my bedroom ;)

[Koepi]

@Nic:

Do you have any clue what to do about the cases where the first soundtrack is vorbis@44.1khz stereo and the 2nd is i.e. 22.050hz mono? In that case, if you switch audio, the filtergraph starts running faster. I don't see how to prevent this, except for making the filtergraph stop, switch the stream, search to the position again, and restart the graph. This will look a bit jerky but might work.

What do you think?

Regards
Koepi

[Nic]

Didn't know it did that...Ill look at that this weekend. It can't be too difficult to fix. Does it happen with all audio tracks or just vorbis?

-Nic

[Koepi]

IIRC it happens always if sample rate/channel cofiguration (5.1, stereo, mono) changes between the soundtracks.

Ah, and while you're on it, can you also look into the situation, where AC3 is muxed into OGM with vorbis sound as well? it seems that the ac3-stream always gets delivered, and you switch between the vorbis tracks (or something like that, I'll search for the bug reports again and will edit this post accordingly).

I'm still a bit clueless looking at the sources... ;)

Regards
Koepi

[Nic]

Ohhh, BTW the vc6 sources I posted are missing a .def file (the standard type one you get with DirectShow fitlers, use one from another directshow project for now and just include it otherwise you wont be able to register the filter)

There are a few memory leaks as well that need to be patched.

-Nic

[Koepi]

LIBRARY OggDS.ax

EXPORTS
DllMain PRIVATE
DllGetClassObject PRIVATE
DllCanUnloadNow PRIVATE
DllRegisterServer PRIVATE
DllUnregisterServer PRIVATE


Will that suffice? I'm still searching for the file needed here
E:\data\progtemp\OggDSsrc_VC6\main.cpp(43): catastrophic error: could not open source file "ShObjIdl.h"
which seems not to be part of DXSDK. I think I need to d/l a new platform SDK and install it :-/

Regards
Koepi

[Nic]

Yup you need the platform SDK. Actually I think im cheating and using the include and lib folders from MSVC .net 2003 ;)
And that .def file is all you need :)

-Nic

[Koepi]

Ok, thanks :)

Currently i'm at file 4 from 15 of the PlatformSDK 3790.0/February 2003. Looking forward to be able to compile current OggMux as well again ;) Damn these 340MB d/l...

Later,

Regards
Koepi

[HughMagoo]

the common behavior I have seen with OGM and AC3&Ogg muxed together is that regardless of the number of each type of audio streams one of each will always be enabled.

I have encoded files with one or two AC3 tracks and one or two Ogg tracks, and they work fine for me, but A) I use zoomplayer to switch between which "directsound device" (renderer) is being used, and B) even if I didn't I think it would work for me because I send AC3 out through S/PDIF and I decode Ogg which are two different outputs on my sound card and system.

There is also the problem of Ogg streams of different channel number and frequency, mono or stereo etc... I have seen reports that this doesn't work very well, so I always use 48k, stereo Oggs, even for commentary which I could make smaller without this limitation.

I might have missed it, but is there anyway to have OGM properly report video bitrate, for instance for file-spec checking software like MediaInfo.. seems like a OGM bug that you can't externally check the video bitrate because you have muxedinto OGM.

hope I haven't been too simplistic here. I might mention that even though I am new here, I have been reading for a while, but I have already gone into the forum control panel and turned off viewing others' signatures.. man its like watching a good movie on network TV, all the commercials and fodder interrupting a nice experience.. and many of them longer than the actual posts themselves.

oh well, thanks for listening.

[Koepi]

The bitrate? Will be complicated since OGG is designed for streaming, where you theoretically can't know the real bitrate because a stream doesn't really end (that's a little simplistic as well).

But I think it should be possible to add that info.

Regards
Koepi

P.S.: finaly i got OggDS to compile now. Let's see what I can do.

[Koepi]

The original OggDS.def is this one:


LIBRARY OggDS.DLL
EXPORTS
DllGetClassObject PRIVATE
DllCanUnloadNow PRIVATE
DllRegisterServer PRIVATE
DllUnregisterServer PRIVATE


Just cut that out and paste it in a textfile which you rename to OggDS.def.

For the nsis-installer script:
I still can't figure out which license.txt got used in OggDS ;) I'll try to re-assemble it as it is missing in the sources.

You have to create a "release"-folder in your source tree in which you send tree files from the OggVorbis-SDK, namely ogg.DLL, vorbis.DLL, vorbisenc.DLL and finally the OggDS.dll which you created during the build process.

I just assemble this info in case someone wnats to help out but isn't getting things to work :)

Regards
Koepi

[Koepi]

Find attached the adopted NSIS script and license.txt to create an installer for OggDS (I set the OggDS version to 0.9.9.6 for now as we're working on it. we can make names like 0.9.9.6-1...X as well to show the progress (if we make some...)).

Put both files into your base-dir of the oggds.-sources and create an release folder where you put the files into like described in the post above.

Regards
Koepi

[bond]

wouldnt it be better to call the whole thing something like 0.9.9.3.1 or so and only after all 0.9.9.5 changes from tobias have been implemeted -> 0.9.9.6?

[Suiryc]

Originally posted by Nic
Good, Its needed for CoreAAC (those two initialisation bytes). Also when writing to the fourcc in stream_header, you may not want to do a strcpy as its only 4 bytes big and it will append a 0. Better to use strncpy(...,...,4); But apart from those very minor things its great :) Works really well... :)

Cheers,
-Nic
Yup but that wouldn't matter at that time since the ending 0x00 would be written in the size field, which I would set later to sizeof(stream_header) ;)
(I also found this little problem when updating VirtualDubMod sources ;))

[Koepi]

Originally posted by bond
wouldnt it be better to call the whole thing something like 0.9.9.3.1 or so and only after all 0.9.9.5 changes from tobias have been implemeted -> 0.9.9.6?

I decided against that as the first available builds will have already some different features than 0.9.9.3.
We should add a "-1" or something in any case to show that this isn't the "old OggDS branch" anymore though.

Maybe we should start a poll for that (even if I don't like polls ;) ).

Regards
Koepi

[DAvenger]

I like 0.9.9.6 better ;) Anyway, important is that it works and not how it is called :rolleyes:

[bond]

imho 0.9.9.6 would mean that all 0.9.9.5 features are implemented...

hm, i think it depends whether you and nic plan/have time to implement all of tobias' 0.9.9.5 changes

if yes, i would wait calling it 0.9.9.6 (and start with 0.9.9.3.1 or 0.9.9.3-1 or so (adding .1 looks more proper imo))
if no (and the 0.9.9.5 changes arent really necessary), than i would start with 0.9.9.6 (no need to add -1)


btw. i still think that a sourceforge project and the splitting of the filter is a great idea ;)

[Nic]

"Maybe we should start a poll"?!
When did you change your name to Christian ;) lol (just kidding! :D )

"Anyway, important is that it works and not how it is called".
Thats my thoughts too. Ill keep you posted with progress over the weekend. Hopefully Koepi will have the PlatformSDK and then we can really move forward :)

-Nic

[Koepi]

Nic,

I have the SDK installed and successfully compiled the filters - that's why I wrote a bit about "how to get the thing started", just in case someone is willing to give you/us a hand :)

Unfortunately I don't even know where to start. It looks alright everywhere in my eyes ;)

Regards
Koepi

[Koepi]

Ok, I searched a little and found something about Unicode.

Would it suffice to add

_tcscpy(target.string, (LPCTSTR)source.str);

around each string to make the filters unicode aware (...are they still capable to work on win9x after that?)?

That'd be a start for properly supporting "utf-8" and stuff i think.

Regards
Koepi

[Nic]

Ok, here's a good place to start. Get it compiled, then go Tools->Register Control (which is the same as doing regsvr32).

Then goto Project->Settings->Debug Tab. And set the "exectuable for debug session" to wherever you have graphedit.

Hit F5 to debug and graphedit will load. Load an OGM file up. then quite graphedit. VC6 will kick in and mention the memory leaks. You'll also be able to place breakpoints. This is how I debug directshow at least.

So get started! :)

-Nic

ps
Best probably to use MultiByteToWideChar and WideCharToMultiByte for Unicode conversions

[Animaniac]

Originally posted by Koepi
@Nic:

Do you have any clue what to do about the cases where the first soundtrack is vorbis@44.1khz stereo and the 2nd is i.e. 22.050hz mono? In that case, if you switch audio, the filtergraph starts running faster. I don't see how to prevent this, except for making the filtergraph stop, switch the stream, search to the position again, and restart the graph. This will look a bit jerky but might work.

What do you think?

Regards
Koepi

That's one reason why the splitter needs to be separated. The output pin for audio must remain a constant frequency/bits/channels. (Gabest) It's entirely a DirectShow limitation if you want to have a splitter built-in, as far as I understand.

[Nic]

Can you explain to me more about the splitter being "built-in" and why that would effect this? as much detail as you can. Thanks :)

-Nic

[Koepi]

You're cruel, Nic. As if I ever tracked down a memory leak in my life ;)

I'll try my best.

Regards
Koepi

[Animaniac]

Originally posted by Nic
Can you explain to me more about the splitter being "built-in" and why that would effect this? as much detail as you can. Thanks :)

-Nic

Well this is second-hand information I have gathered from Gabest, you'd probably be better off asking him for the technicals. Basically, when the filter graph is built, the audio pin needs to have a defined channel number, sampling frequency, and bit depth. This is all well and good so long as your OGM has only 2 channel, 44.1 kHz, 16 bit audio. But, if you want to have a 6 channel audio stream, and a 2 channel audio stream you run into problems. I think this is one of the reasons AC3 in OGM is not working. The Matroska folks (forgive me for mentioning them) have gotten around this by outputting all streams at the splitter. This will undoubtedly cause problems with WMP and other players without audio switching. Morgan Stream switcher is also limited by the above mentioned. Somehow, by the greatness of Gabest, MPC is able to handle this using its embeded switcher filter. I have no idea how that works, but I'd venture to say it's using some tricks that are allowed when you're not a standalone filter. In short, I'd ask Gabest. ^_^

[Koepi]

I'm very slowly progressing, but start to understand the filters after asome time of code review and "trying out this, trying out that".

Finally I fixed a thing which always bugged me just for fun:
If you use the language-menu from WMP (6.4) all streams have languages or chapter names, but the video stream always showed "0". Now it's showing the title in there. Nothing huge, but at least a start.

(Far too early for searching memory leaks Nic, sorry to disappoint you there :-/ I didn't code smething like that in ages and so i need much more time...)

Just a little feedback what's going on here ;)

Regards
Koepi

[Suiryc]

Originally posted by Liisachan
and my concern is, what's going on about SubTitDS ?
isn't it still open-source?

Improving OggDS would be nice, but it would be great if SubTitDS is also in the OGM project.
I think it would be better to make sure OggDS and VSFilter can work together because VSFilter already handle more than only 'simple' SRT subtitles and also has a lot more options.

[Animaniac]

Originally posted by Suiryc
I think it would be better to make sure OggDS and VSFilter can work together because VSFilter already handle more than only 'simple' SRT subtitles and also has a lot more options.

Yes, and being able to use Gabest's Subtitle Source filters for muxing would definately be a better solution.

[unmei]

I think it would be better to make sure OggDS and VSFilter can work together

i'd appreciate that decicion too.
I always have trouble when playing a OGM with subtitles (admited, i rather optimised my setup for another container, but well), i need to switch settings in VSfilter and the splitter and stop/restart for every file - it's really anoying and i bet it has something to do with the filter concurrencing or slightly incompatible. im not sure if the splitter preferred to load subtitDS or it simply resets VSfilter or what happens, but clicking around everytime for the subs to work is not nice and i dont have to do that with the other container.

And i really like VSfilter for the subs, imho it just looks best (the antialiasing is neater and i have least config troubles - except the above mentioned thing)

[Nic]

Ok, my plans are now:
1. Get the filters working with CoreVorbis
2. Get OGMuxer into a nice GUI
3. Look at the bugs and unicode problems
4. Get VSFilter working as best I can with OGM.

Its more work than it sounds. Ill tell you how I get on :)

-Nic

[outlyer]

Originally posted by Koepi
(...) but the video stream always showed "0". Now it's showing the title in there.Thank You! It always bugged me too :D

[kilg0r3]

yeah that's great. I always thought it was my fault.

[Nic]

No.1 (getting CoreVorbis working instead of the normal built in filter) is done and finished. Very easy, only just got chance to do it though.

Im getting there, just slowly.

[Koepi]

Nic,

did you get my changes for that "video 0" fix? if you could add them to your sources it'd be cool! :)

(I just bought a "small pool" yesterday evening and am enjoying the sun, sorry for not coding today!)

I looked into teh IAMMediaContent stuff but wasn't yet able to add that interface. I hope I can add that during the week.

Regards
Koepi

[Nic]

Koepi I added you code, but had to patch it. If title did not exist in the OGM, then pLang would be NULL and the strcat would crash the filter.

Ive changed my mind (as always ;) Im not going to write a GUI out of OGMuxer im building its usage into your OggMux as an alternative muxing method. One program means less confusion and ease for the user. Sound good?

-Nic

[Koepi]

Nic,

you're a star (as always :)

I like that idea, we have to extend (OggMux)->AnyMux a little for that, but that shouldn't be a problem at all :)

Btw., should I put up the sources and/or binaries to the OggMux sourceforge project as well? I think this makes sense. (Please create a SF handle for you then, you should be administrator as well).

[NB: Damn, i burnt a little in the sun - but hey, I have to prepare for holidays! :)]

Thanks for all the nice work,

best regards & cheers

Koepi

P.S.: i forgot, if TITLE isn't set explicitly it should be video source name minus extension, wanted to code that as well in the muxer...

[Nic]

Other notes:
"The tray icon shows now also the title instead of "Ogg DSF""
*Thats now been added like 0.9.9.5 had

OggMux im adding bits to it, using CoreVorbis breaks its Ogg muxing.(because when reading an Ogg the ogg spliter is used and now its Format has changed). I do have a sourceforge name from when I used to work on FAAC with menno back in the early days days of AAC. But I cant remember the password. For now ill send you the source once done and you can be the oggmux "editor" ;)

-Nic

[bond]

great to hear that things are coming :)

nic, you seem to have some sort of SF-phobia ;)

[Eric B]

I'm using Ogg media contenair since more a year now.

As said previously, the main problem I had is when there is many audio streams with different channels: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=46080
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=46756
(e.g. AC3 5.1, ogg vorbis stereo and ogg vorbis mono)

About mono, there is a 'bug' in VirtualDubMod that avoid to mux a real mono file (1 channel only) as said here (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=738599&group_id=65889&atid=512619).

Do you think it will be possible to correct that in OGM ?

In that point, Matroska performs better, but I'm still waiting for chapters and comments tag in mkv as those of ogm...

[Koepi]

Eric,

1 or 2 pages before this one we discussed that already.

Koepi

[Nic]

Ive made SRT subs work well with VSFilter, from now on though all the subs selection will be done from VSFilter rather than from the OggDS trayicon...

...Is that going to be ok?, (also means SubTitDs won't be used anymore).

Ill post the OggMux GUI with OGMuxer.exe (AAC) support here today. For now i've turned off the DirectShow support until I release the new OggDS which will allow for delays of all type of audio when muxing (like OGMuxer.exe can do)

Cheers,
-Nic

[Kurosu]

Originally posted by Nic
Ive made SRT subs work well with VSFilter, from now on though all the subs selection will be done from VSFilter rather than from the OggDS trayicon...

...Is that going to be ok?, (also means SubTitDs won't be used anymore).

My problem is that VSFilter isn't likely to support <font color> tags, only correctly processed by SubtitDS. Therefore, I either have to keep using SubtitDS (and not your filter), wait for a possible SSA support in OGM, or switch to Matroska.

Therefore, it won't be ok, but I guess I'm an exception.

[Liisachan]

Originally posted by Kurosu
My problem is that VSFilter isn't likely to support <font color> tags I guess it's possible.
BTW have you ever tried to put a tag like {\c&Hffcc99&} in your SRT?
This is not documented, so hackish, but already works as color tags in SRT in OGM for me, with VSFIlter...

[Nic]

Thats a fair point, ill try and make it compatible with both via a switch/reg key.

-Nic

ps
Fixed a really annoying memory leak thats probably always been there (it never deleted the Pins on exit!)

[Kurosu]

Originally posted by Liisachan
I guess it's possible.
BTW have you ever tried to put a tag like {\c&Hffcc99&} in your SRT?
This is not documented, so hackish, but already works as color tags in SRT in OGM for me, with VSFIlter...
Ah ah, I wouldn't know SSA and srt could be mixed at such a level. Thanks for the info. However it really is hackish, as I wonder if this won't be broken at some point.

All that somewhat makes me think of the websites optimized for a particular browser: I fear I have to mux both a VSFilter-compatable sub stream and a SubtitDS one and name them accordingly, to ensure maximum compatability. In fact, what is really needed is that VSfilter is able to parse correctly those tags *whistles innocently*

[Nic]

I spoke to Gabest about it, seems like he'd like to implement it. But I dont know if he'll get to implement it. He also says VSFilter might be too slow for some people? Is that going to be the case or are we all ok to switch to VSFilter?

(I dont want to have to depend on the SubTitDS filter, which is closed source at the moment, although I've emailed Tobias for the source....Ill let you know if I get a reply)

-Nic

[Gaia]

SubTitDS filter never worked with Win98/ME because of unicode. So VSFilter is great...

[Nic]

Hmmm. Opinions are split. Im going to add <font support to VSFilter or at least make it so it ignores the tag (otherwise already muxed OGMs will display the <Font tag).

Sound ok?

-Nic

[Gaia]

Great :)

[Kurosu]

Fine by me. I have already messaged Gabest about this in VSrip, and didn't want to bother him with this, so I think it's the simplest solution.

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by Kurosu Ah ah, I wouldn't know SSA and srt could be mixed at such a level. Thanks for the info. However it really is hackish, as I wonder if this won't be broken at some point.

If you guys are going to add new tags to SRT format, wouldnt it be worth while listening closely to the player developers out there who will NOT use vsfilter.dll ?

Dont forget, USF is not so far away, there are 2 USF editor tools working already ( unmei's U96 and the one from Andre Covac ), and muxing USF into OGM shouldnt be too big of a problem IMHO ..... is it really worthwhile breaking SRT backwards compatibility because of a few weeks of additional waiting ?

[Nic]

Christian: For now ill add the HTML tags into VSFilter which won't break anything, and is for backwards compatibility with old OGM files. And then we can all take advantage of USF, if it takes off. Does that make sense?

-Nic

[pixolex]

@ChristianHJW

Please update the USF home page with the links to that tools :) it would be nice see the progresses...

[Atamido]

@Nic: How is the duration stored for OGM's native subtitle format? Actually, what are the basic specs for it?

[Nic]

Native format? At present the only one truely supported is SRT.

-Nic

[Atamido]

How is the SRT stored in OGM?

For instance, in Matroska the timecodes are stripped from the the text and the blocks timecode is set to the start time while the durations is computed from the difference between the start time and the end time.

[Nic]

Yes, OGM (Or at least OGMuxer) does it in a similar way. Why do you ask?

[Atamido]

I have not seen a way to define a duration in Ogg. How does OGM store this? I'm just asking out of curiousity because I was talking about it earlier in the thread and noone really mentioned it.

[Nic]

Oh I see, you're coming from the school of Spyder questioning....
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=346000#post346000

...Where you ask questions you already know the answer too (Or could find out about privately, but do it publically) as to make OGM sound bad and Matroska sound good....

...Yes that is a good tactic, Christian has taught you well my friend.
Here's a clue, forget about OGM and the threads about it on this board. And just get on with making your DShow filters good, chapter support, and all the rest, and stay out of threads that concern OGM.

I thought you we're asking a fair question, and it is a good question. But when you say "out of curiosity"...My paranoia starts to kick in.

You're best bet is to ask Cyrius/Suiryc for an answer, and I will look through OGMuxer's source again and post a better answer, I just saw it calculate a duration and jumped to the conclusion that it did in the same way...Ill post the exact way in a little while.

-Nic

ps
OK, It appears the sub_duration is used to state how many "samples" this sub is, which works as a kind duration and means the next granulepos will be set to the time of the next subtitle. If the picture needs to have a moment of no subs, then a blank subtitle is created and inserted. I hope that answers your questions. The source code can explain it better: Packetizer.cpp and SRTReader.cpp in OGMuxer is where to look first.

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by Nic ...Yes that is a good tactic, Christian has taught you well my friend.

Now i am starting to take things personally, sorry Nic, for the very first time since we know each other and since this crazy 'war of the formats' has been started here.

Of course you are right, there is a reason why Pamel is showing interest in OGM, and asking 'silly' questions about it. Yes, he has a bad and evil meaning behind asking, you are perfectly right.

Its mainly about one thing :

When will the current developers of OGM ( you and koepi ) act according to their responsibility towards their users and start documenting OGM. Now bash me if you want, or even make sure i get banned from this place. But admit that this questions is very very valid.

Our stuff started with a good documentation and clear specs. OGM started as a quick hack for private use ( ask Tobias ), and not only Cyrius and Mosu were asking with a smile in the face where the famous OGM docs are when Monty was trying to bash our project on Gentto forums.

I agree it was bad bad bad bad from Pamel to AGAIN POST IN A F****ING OGM THREAD, being a core MKV team member and despite that fact that we clearly gave advice to not do this anymore, and rest assured me and robux4 will have some very clear words with him about this, but the point remains, its a valid question and OGM related :

When do you or koepi plan to start documenting the OGM container format ???

[Nic]

Hi Christian, my apologies, that wasn't against you...I just meant it as your the "head" of posting about matroska, and Pamel sometimes comes across as your apprentice :)

Hopefully this may come from others interested in Ogg, and hopefully this will help bring about precise docs for the Ogg spec, without me or Koepi having to write them (although Ogg is quite a simple format, documentation for it wouldn't be too ardious)

My interest in OGM is not trying compete with Matroska, im just trying to support the userbase OGM already has, as best I can. So anyone is free to ask questions in this thread about OGM, if they are proper questions and not trying to poke holes in the OGM format. I hope experiences can be shared between the two container formats in constructive ways :)

Take Care,
-Nic

ps
Edit: Just realised I didn't answer your questions exactly:
1) Yes it is a very valid question and important to any format
2) Myself and Koepi will put something together if Xiph or those affiliated with it does not.

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by Nic Hi Christian, my apologies, that wasn't against you...I just meant it as your the "head" of posting about matroska, and Pamel sometimes comes across as your apprentice :)

Apology gladly accepted Nic, in fact i was scared to death that even you was not amongst the people seeing the bad guy in me, pushing matroska by all means, and even if i had to kill for it :scared: !

Certain things are developing with OGM, from what I hear, that make me think Xiph are taking it more seriously (and as such ill probably have to stop referring to it as OGM and instead as Ogg )

See, this is where marketing people think different than developers do. Before i would invest my time into developing OGM, i would FIRST contact Xiph people and get a clear signal from them about the future of OGM, and if they are going to make Theora compatible, but thats just IMHO ;) ...

Hopefully this may come from others interested in Ogg, and hopefully this will help bring about precise docs for the Ogg spec, without me or Koepi having to write them (although Ogg is quite a simple format, documentation for it wouldn't be too ardious)

True, once Xiph adapted OGM it would live a long life for sure, and you wouldnt have to care about documenting it to make sure OGM files can be read in future, so they are not lost for their users ....

My interest in OGM is not trying compete with Matroska

OGM and matroska are competitors, period. A developer adding more features to the OGM container is making it attractive for people to use for their rips, and this is a clear competitive thing to matroska. I dont say this is not allowed, but thats just a fact nobody can deny.

Im just trying to support the userbase OGM already has, as best I can. So anyone is free to ask questions in this thread about OGM, if they are proper questions and not trying to poke holes in the OGM format. I hope experiences can be shared between the two container formats in constructive ways :)

There is nothing wrong about making sure that OGM files can be played in future. We also support OGM in all our tools, as you may be aware.

Edit: Just realised I didn't answer your questions exactly:
1) Yes it is a very valid question and important to any format

Yes, and thats something the complete team is very proud about, the very good docs that robux4 has made before starting to code. Gabest could make his splitter and muxer filter from this docs in 3 days, and without using the lib, and they would work perfectly right first time.

2) Myself and Koepi will put something together if Xiph or those affiliated with it does not.

Contact them !!! Monty was using OGM in the past to try to make our stuff ridiculous, as Theora isnt working yet. Now is the time to get clear statements from him and the rest of Xiph about OGMs future, not if Theora is released and working .... just my 2 cents !

[Nic]

That is where marketing people come from first. See, the thing is that at the end of the day, people just want something that works. They don't care if it's supported, got docs...they just want it to work. So IMHO, I get it to work...then I tell the world how great it is and write docs about it. Not the other way around.

I do think you advertise and push Matroska a little too much at times. But at least you only do it in this part of the forum (which is where matroska belongs). Like starting that poll you did? Things like that just p*ss off the moderator's Christian and I can't believed it served you much of a purpose.
Sometimes I can't help but feel you might "shoot yourself in the foot". I.e. people won't use matroska, no matter how great it is, because of the tactics to push it into the lime light.

For me, it's not a competition, the formats aren't in competition. Its just user choice, if it was a competition then Id expect a winner. If I thought it was a competition then that means Ive put myself up against Gabest, Toff, RobUx4, Mosu, etc. Hey, im good, but I aint that good ;) lol
(I.e I don't fight battles I dont think I can win...which is what I think some of your team sometimes does with the moderator's here...but I don't think of this as a battle or about making things "attractive")

I hope you can see where im coming from :)

-Nic

ps
Remember when Tobias made OGM, he was very quiet and didn't need to advertise everywhere to get people to like it. People just took to it. Hopefully matroska can do the same.

[el00343]

Originally posted by Nic

ps
Remember when Tobias made OGM, he was very quiet and didn't need to advertise everywhere to get people to like it. People just took to it. Hopefully matroska can do the same.

wise words nic.I concur.

Christian, users aren't dumb.Especially in the oss world.They can judge,compare and if matroska deserves to take over ogm, it will.In the mean time...don't preach about it everywhere.Not that what you do is wrong, but especially in the oss world the best marketing is the best programming.Not advertising.

[ChristianHJW]

Can someone please split this conversation of Nic and myself into a new thread please ? I fear its going a bit OT ;) ...

Originally posted by Nic That is where marketing people come from first. ... wrong, sorry. marketing people are hired to market stuff that isnt existing in most cases, with the few things they have. That was what i was doing for a pretty long time when matroska was still theory, and i understand this must have been annoying for some people here, but again i was and am convinced matroska wouldnt be where it is now if robux4 had made the docs hidden in the cellar, and he had presented them once they were done.

See, the thing is that at the end of the day, people just want something that works. They don't care if it's supported, got docs...they just want it to work. So IMHO, I get it to work... ... sorry, again i dont agree. People invest a lot of time and passion into their movies, and they want the feeling they will be able to use their rips in future also.

then I tell the world how great it is and write docs about it. Not the other way around. ... strange, this is not how i was told a good tech should do things during my time at university here in Germany ... but anyway ....

I do think you advertise and push Matroska a little too much at times. But at least you only do it in this part of the forum (which is where matroska belongs). .. in fact, yes, i am letting the video encoding world knwo about what matroska can do, and i am posting in a lot of places, and honestly speaking almost everywhere people are much more friendly if i show up doing this than here. I still tend to believe this is because some of the mods here have other plans than matroska becoming popular and are acting against it by trying to constantly miscredit our work, but this is just my personal opinion and i cant prove that.

Like starting that poll you did? Things like that just p*ss off the moderator's Christian and I can't believed it served you much of a purpose. .. you guys think that was a fake ?? If you had the faintest idea to whom i am constantly talking about getting hardware support for matroska, you'd be shocked, i swear. Of course, i admit the reaction is currently close to zero, because our userbase is not big enough, but anybody who knows me ( and you SHOULD know me meanwhile my friend ) will understand that i wont stop until its achieved. Actually, iam trying to organize an appointment with a manufacturer in China during my next bussiness trip to there, and believe me i know my job as a salesman once i have the 'customer' in front of me ( its even more fun if its hobby ;) ), i can be pretty convincing :D . Supporting a container is not so hard from a technical point of view, at least if standard compression formats ar ebeing used, like AAC and MPEG4, but we'll see.

Sometimes I can't help but feel you might "shoot yourself in the foot". I.e. people won't use matroska, no matter how great it is, because of the tactics to push it into the lime light. ... we may loose some, but win many much more. And once people have actually been using it, like the guys in the VirtualVCR forums recently, they can become addicted pretty quickly, just like i am ;) ...

For me, it's not a competition, the formats aren't in competition. Its just user choice, if it was a competition then Id expect a winner. .. see, thats my main point. If both OGM and MKV are futher developed and none of them gets hardware support, then in the end MP4 will be the 'winner' and MPEG-LA the laughing third. I am sorry, but IMHO the OGM format has NOTHING to hold against MP4, its worse in every aspect and as soonas an editing tool will be available for MP4, OGM would die. MKV can compete with MP4, its a bit higher in overhead and worse in streaming, but has better editability than MP4.

If I thought it was a competition then that means Ive put myself up against Gabest, Toff, RobUx4, Mosu, etc. Hey, im good, but I aint that good ;) lol .... the speed you made the VC6 compile of libmatroska clearly puts you into the same category Nic, and if i could onyl convince you to become a steady team member ( yes, thats unusual to work in a team maybe ) and develop our mkxds.dll .... :sigh: .....

(I.e I don't fight battles I dont think I can win...which is what I think some of your team sometimes does with the moderator's here...but I don't think of this as a battle or about making things "attractive"). I hope you can see where im coming from :) -Nic

We are not here to fight battles against mods, only against MP4 becoming the next standard container .... and sorry, i dont think there is enough room for 2 opensource containers if any of them would want to achieve that, but maybe its again the marketing guy getting possession of me ....

ps Remember when Tobias made OGM, he was very quiet and didn't need to advertise everywhere to get people to like it. People just took to it. Hopefully matroska can do the same.

First, you maybe forgot that already, but it was me who was pushing OGM a lot at that time, because i didnt know anough about the subject and i loved to use Vorbis with video. Make a search on 'OGM' and go for the very old posts, and look it up if you dont believe me. Tobias' filters were first tested on the powerdivx.com forums, weeks before they made their way to Doom9, and from there we spread the word.

Second, it was the first container to be able to use Vorbis in video, and Vorbis was clearly superior to anything else at this time. Today things have changed, there is a cold wind blowing into OGMs face with strong competiton from many sides, Real being opensource, MP4 being usable already and KV making big improvements every day ...... i promise you, nobody would ever look a it without some form of advertising today ..... but thats another story, we wont find out how things would have been if OGM would have never left powerdivx.com ...

[robUx4]

Well said. That's what the coders behind matroska think too. In the end, no matter how loud you shout here, the user will decide for themselves. And both Nic/Koepi and us are trying to give users the tools and features they like.

Now it's true that Pamel and Christian often try to "force" things a bit. Of course, they are proud of the work we did. It's also a "natural" reaction against all the critics we got when we were creating the format on (electronic) paper and not by starting to code. That may be unusual to talk and say "we have done this thing, it still doesn't exist but it's much better than anything else". It drove mad many people in the end. Especially because we were looking for people from this particular forum to support us or at least check if we did something wrong. All this phase almost lead to angry people about our requests (hopefully some people joined and helped, sometimes the same that worked on OGM)... I think with time and working time it will be fading.

And yes, there's no possible deny that Matroska and OGM are competitors. I'm not going to tell you why and how I prefer one of them. But I think competition is a good thing, a driving force and we can still work all together and share knowledge, for example on how this fucking DirectShow or WMP works.

[Nic]

Ok, I agree with everything robux4 says...I honestly don't think of them as competitors, but I can see why you'd consider them that way.

But Christian's post goes quite off topic, I think (no offense). With "That is where marketing people come from first" I was actually agreeing with "this is where marketing people think different than developers do". But Maybe I stated it wrong.

Advertisment is of course essential to a certain point of view...I/we dont expect you to keep your mouth shut until everything with matroska is all finished. But you have driven the mods crazy, with threads being turned into Matroska threads...I know matroska, when finished, will solved all manner of problems and im sure you're excited about it. But just hold back a little (honestly, I say that for your own good).

Im glad your winning friends at other forums...I don't actually think mp4 will take off as a popular container for the things we(the community) do...only for commercial products. But thats my opinion, and what do I know?.

I know what you mean about the docs bit, and your right if the code hadn't been there first. You write docs to plan, I don't need to plan, I need to finish. Then write the docs. For OGM at present I do believe thats the best way. Im supporting whats already there, not trying to encourage others to use it (i.e. also why I dont see this "competition" thats supposed to be between us)

"but IMHO the OGM format has NOTHING to hold against MP4, its worse in every aspect and as soonas an editing tool will be available for MP4, OGM would die. MKV can compete with MP4"

Then you have nothing to worry about from OGM, so forget all about it. And when im done with it, maybe I can bring what I've learnt to bits of Matroska :)

Just support your userbase and watch it grow...and ill support the OGM one. For example, for people that like using OGM, AAC(+) is hard to insert into it. Ill make it easier, etc. Thats all im doing with OGM, not trying to beat matroska.

"mods here have... [been] ...trying to constantly miscredit our work"...Could you show examples of that? If you want I can show you where you have turned threads upside down, upset mods, etc. Maybe we can both learn something..

Don't worry about this thread. It was f**ked from day one by your Team and others. Ill have this closed once we're done and ill start a fresh.

-Nic

[robUx4]

IN the next thread just state "matroska not allowed" :D

[Nic]

Why do people think im against matroska? Its good there's a discussion between the two. As long as it is technical and not in aid to promote one and poke holes in the other. Maybe we can swap ideas.
Maybe I should write "No Pamel and/or Chris" ;) (just kidding)

Yourself, gabest, toff, etc thoughts will always be welcome :)

-Nic

[Atamido]

Originally posted by Nic
...Where you ask questions you already know the answer too (Or could find out about privately, but do it publically) as to make OGM sound bad and Matroska sound good.... I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. I am asking these questions here because I don't know the answer, and an answer here is a little more permanent. I had a more vested interest because I was trying to make sure that the subtitles would be done properly. I had comments and questions (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=57217&perpage=20&pagenumber=3#post342320) before about subtitle storage, but nobody freaking answered them. I was going to bring it back up because you were on the subject of subtitles again. It is really sad to see the several pages of useless content that you and Christian posted back and forth. I even got alot of flack from the Matroska team, first for posting here, second for trying to help out OGM.

You're best bet is to ask Cyrius/Suiryc for an answer,
I have talked to Cyrius about OGM, but I don't think I ever asked about how it did the duration. The reason I didn't ask him again is because he doesn't really care very much about putting other subtitles in OGM, and this is where it needs to be discussed.

OK, It appears the sub_duration is used to state how many "samples" this sub is, which works as a kind duration and means the next granulepos will be set to the time of the next subtitle. If the picture needs to have a moment of no subs, then a blank subtitle is created and inserted. I hope that answers your questions. The source code can explain it better: Packetizer.cpp and SRTReader.cpp in OGMuxer is where to look first. :eek: Useful content! Okay, so it is the same method that MCF uses. You explanation makes perfect sense. It just ends the subtitle whenever it recieves a new one, no matter what the content.

This probably means that to store SSA, you are going to want to use one of the fields within the text to define a duration. I don't think the same method of empty packets would work for SSA because it can do things based on timing. Does anyone know how SSA does its time based effects? (I realize that I could just PM billbaround, or someone else for an answer, but this is much more useful to everyone.)

[DAvenger]

We are not here to fight battles against mods, only against MP4 becoming the next standard container ....

Sorry to say this but MP4 will become industry standard whether you like it or not. Actually, MP4 is very good piece of work ;)

You may argue that it's not free :rolleyes: but that does not necessarily mean it's bad. Well, *regular users do not care! Have you already paid the license fee for that XviD (or any other) decoder installed on your system? :)

As for companies ... they'll care more about whether the format is widely supported rather than the costs associated with it. 99% ;)

and sorry, i dont think there is enough room for 2 opensource containers if any of them would want to achieve that, but maybe its again the marketing guy getting possession of me ....

This may sound a bit harsh but only one who wants to beat someone here is you. I do not believe that Tobias created OGM as the doom's day weapon against MPEG-LA :)

If Xiph people were more interested in container stuff everything could be different now :rolleyes:

Take care,
DA

*not hanging at doom9 and ha.org 24/7

[Koepi]

Boys, calm down.

Christian clearly states he wants OGM to die and expects us to force it - and he enforces that as well.

My conclusion: please keep the marketing outside the tech discussions here. Polarising the people is a bad thing. Period (c)ChrisHJW.

Let's all do what pleases us most, code on our stuff - you do matroska, we do ogm. (I.e. melgish added matroska support to OggMux which Christian considers a bad program. ... Unfortunately the DSF matroska muxer is way inferiour to the OGM one currently, so it doesn't hold anything like named streams, chapters, title, author,... EDIT: hopefully gabest will code that too.)

See, we do our best to support everything and code as long as it's fun. But since you marketing guys are starting a war here it's no longer about fun.

Stop it. I mean it.

I'm sure Chris will squeeze this post upside-down and cut it where it doesn't belong just to make me look bad again, but i'll sure use my powers then as I can't stand it anymore. I've been watching this a longer time now without doing anything and left poor Nic all alone somehow (sorry nic, but here I am now).

I mean this all in a friendly way: concentrate on the basics - coding. This board/forum/community isn't about advertising - it's about things we use and how to improve them. Keep it that way and we're all lucky.

Thanks for respecting this from now on.

Regards
Koepi

[Atamido]

Yay! More useless posts! Oh wait.....

[Atamido]

I'm just posting in the hopes that the next post will be useful, but be on the next page. I would hate for a useful post to be at the bottome of this twenty pages of uselessness, with the exception of about 10 combined lines of actual content.

Wow, my first two strikes ever, and for rule 11 of all things. Don't I feel sheepish. I'm just sad the trick didn't work. I should have posted just once...

[Doom9]

I still tend to believe this is because some of the mods here have other plans than matroska becoming popular and are acting against it by trying to constantly miscredit our work, but this is just my personal opinion and i cant prove that.
As the guy who's responable for making those people moderators I can honestly say that this isn't the case. And especially you should know how much we love advertising over here.. this forum is a prime target for that, because it's rather large, and has an unusually tech savy and knowledgeable audience. If I were to make a post regarding OGM, I do not want to hear that there are alternatives. You don't go telling a guy who has some problems with DVD-Rs, to do DivX instead, or a guy using ReAuthorist, to use DVD Shrink just because its simpler. The same way, when somebody makes a post about MKV, I don't want to hear that OGM can do this and that which isn't yet implemented in Matroska. We even have a forum rule that says "stay on topic". So, if you're a member of the Matroska team, ask yourself, how many times have I posted a line like "with Matroska you could also do xyz", and if you're a member of the OGM team, ask yourself the reverse question. And every time you make a post, remember that question.. you do NOT want to post like that on this board, especially when the thread is about another format.
You are all well aware that AVI is still very much the most popular container, and all that constant bickering will lead people to believe that all the developers of alternative formats do is shout at each other, rather than code.
as el00343 said, the best marketing in our little corner of the world is good code and working programs, not PR blahblah. So, from now on I demand that you stick to producing good code and helping people when they have problems with your programs. Don't even think about trying to get people using a competing format on board... our members are mature enough to make up their own minds and they don't need constant preaching about why format x is so great. You don't see Isibaar spamming the DivX forums with posts why XviD is better (in his opinion that is), yet a lot of people here use XviD. We also have representants from commercial companies here (Karl from Real for instance) who do not try to convert people to their ways, rather help those who've chosen their format out of their own will. You mentioned making propaganda for OGM. I remember that, but compared to the Matroska buzz, your OGM advertising was just a drop in the ocean. I also have to point out that I never made a lot of advertising for my own site, people still found their way and it has become one of the most important sites for the subject.

I certainly do appreciate that the Matroska team is active here, and trying to help people using mkv. Of course you can have technical discussions as well (those best go to the development forum), but when somebody is talking about a competing format, you leave that discussion alone, especially if you have nothing useful contribute that is directly on subject, and that includes criticial questions. If somebody wants to know how matroska works, there are the specs and the sourcecode, for OGM there's just the source but that is enough. I don't see the reason to discuss technical details for an implementation of xyz if you're not actually going to a) use the code, or b) work on the project. I don't think I'm the only one to see how you reacted to such line of questioning from the Xiph people.

Now that you've been given ample warning, the moderator team will no longer tolerate derouting and hijacking of threads in either direction. We have rules against that and many members have wondered why they weren't implemented... they started wondering if some people are more equal than others, but the truth of the matter is that there's no more equal than equal and if the people involved here can't get their acts together and continue making posts that are majoritarily borderline to rules violations, strikes will follow (and that goes both ways). I could also start pointing out that AVI works just fine and is the only sure thing atm... how would you like that? My standalone plays AVIs, no OGMs and no MKVs :P

[Nic]

@Pamel: I didn't mean you to take offense, and if you really did care about subtitle community and just wanted to know about how OGM was going to support it, thats great :) But when someone asks me how OGM supports something that it has been supporting for ages, and has matroska as the only link in their signature...My paranoia kicked in. But I still answered the question (and all Chris' questions) as best as I could.

I also don't think these pages have been useless. Although, id rather it hadn't happened, somethings needed to be said. And I do feel like we're coming to a conclusion.

Just to state my opinion for the final time: I think matroska is great, and in reality it probably has a lot longer future than OGM. I advise everyone that uses OGM to give Matroska a go, but if you're happy with OGM still after that, then im going to try and help support you.

Please take heed of what Doom9 states, it's really is in everyone's interest. And I hope we can all remain friendly :)

Good Luck (& hoping ill still be welcome on #matroska),
-Nic

ps
OT:
I really like the MPEG-LA, after chatting with Larry Horn, I really like what they're are trying to achieve and they're attitude. They are not the bad guys, the patent holders are the bad guys (if there are any bad guys at all)

[Atamido]

@Nic: I would like to take this opportunity to give you a nice big hug for the apology. I'm glad we can all be friends again. ;)

I was going to make the suggestion some time ago to stop using this thread because it is becoming a little to big and hard to find information. Several smaller threads are usually better. Having 5 topics mixed together makes it hard to focus on any of them.

[kxy]

Originally posted by Nic

I advise everyone that uses OGM to give Matroska a go, but if you're happy with OGM still after that, then im going to try and help support you.

Good Luck (& hoping ill still be welcome on #matroska),
-Nic


I was excited about mkv(before it has a name) ever since it has being talked about in blacksun's channel in corecodec years ago. A while ago, I decided to give mkv a try. I found a few bugs and I reported it. In my personal opinion, mkv has not mature yet. And it simply hasn't done more what OGM has to offer currently. Even though OGM is not bug free, but to me it has lesser bugs more features compare to mkv at that moment(from the user end not from the specs). I simply don't have the time to test every build, and keep reporting the problems. So, I am sticking with OGM for now.

[Nic]

I think there are still people that feel that way too kxy. Lets hope matroska matures nicely, and I fix more OGM bugs than I introduce ;)

I think that's this thread settled for now :) . Im going to have it closed if thats ok with everyone.

-Nic

[el00343]

Originally posted by Nic
I think there are still people that feel that way too kxy. Lets hope matroska matures nicely, and I fix more OGM bugs than I introduce ;)

-Nic

You can be sure there are ;)

edit: I was referring to people, but applies to bugs also :D :D

[Doom9]

I'm going to close this thread now. A moderator will soon split off the on-topic posts so that the useful on-topic discussion can go on.