Matroska Packs v1.0.3 released

[Nibor]

Heya!

The new Matroska Packs v1.0.3 are out! :)
Get them from the normal place, http://packs.matroska.org...

What's changed:
- It now has the newest ffdshow built in, but a decoding only version ( If you want to have encoding functions too, just install your ffdshow after the installation of the pack )
- TTA decoding and encoding filters are included
- Matroska Pack Full detects if a RealVideo decoder is installed and gives a notice at the end how you can install one.
- Of course, the newest versions of every filter
- The installer looks better ;)
- A whole lot of other things I can't remember :)

Filters and versions:
MatroskaSplitter v1.0.2.4 (2004-08-16)
MatroskaMuxer v1.0.0.9 (2004-08-21)
MatroskaProp v2.6 (2004-02-18)
VSFilter v2.33 (2004-08-13)
MMSwitch v0.99 (Matroska edition) (2003-12-30)
CoreAAC v1.0b9 (2004-07-09)
CoreVorbis v1.0b6 (2003-12-15)
CoreFLAC Decoder v0.4.0.46 (2004-08-17)
TTA (2004-08-11)
AC3Filter v0.70b (DCoder fixed version) (2003-08-18)
MatrixMixer v0.30b (2003-10-06)
ffdshow 2004-08-21 (decoding only) (2004-08-21)
RealMediaSplitter v1.0.0.9 (2004-01-25)

Feedback is always welcome!

Have fun :)

- nibor -

[Liisachan]

Great, really great!

Especially I like this new ffdshow.
In 1.0.2, there was an old ffdshow from 2003, which decodes XviD 1.0.x
wrongly, fps being downed like 66%. That could give one a wrong impression that MKV container would kill fps.

I like the new splitter too. The skippy-audio-around-35-sec bug that was really annoying, is now fixed, or at least workaround-ed.

With 1.0.2 pack we had to assume that MKV was still beta, unadvisable for general use; 'wrong fps' was such a fundamental bug, plus that skippy audio was also too betaish...
but now the both has been fixed in the official Packs. Good news anyway.

I also founded that the splitter in 1.0.3 = Gabets's 1.0.2.4;
which i suppose is also a prudent choice. Altho the alt filters are really promissing (especially, OGM-like trayicon-based multiaudio switching...that has been really needed), and alatho the alt filters have been improved at the surprising speed, it is not too stable atm.

Thanks again anyway smile.gif :)

Edit: Haali's splitter does have its forte.
In ffdshow's 'info' box, Gabest's 1.0.2.4 reports fps=25 even if it is not 25.0, like 23.976. I'm afraid 1.0.2.4 still has some potential problem... Haali's filter reports the fps correctly.

[robUx4]

Heh cool.

We have very high hopes on Haali's filter. And we are already planning to release a 1.1.0 pack when his filter becomes stable and the menu feature is done.

Edit: Yes, we preferred to use known filters for this release and not use general users as beta testers :D

[jk888]

FINALLY! I've waited so long for this it seems, I've been getting annoying emails from people who watch my video encodes but didn't install the codecs I included properly. I had Matroska Pack 1.02 and the new ffdshow included, and had specific instructions to install Matroska first then the new ffdshow.

But end users are just too dumb to understand it all, then some don't even know english, so they install them wrong and complain my video sucks!

FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY!!!

Adding the decoding version only of ffdshow is great, I didn't realize you could separate the encoding and decoding parts.

[SeeMoreDigital]

According to the Matroska web site, the 'Pack Lite' is specified as follows: -

Matroska Pack Lite v1.0.3 - 2004-08-21
Download (0.73 MB / 768'931 Bytes)

Reduced to the max, this pack contains only the very basic stuff needed to play Matroska files with Vorbis audio and Subtitles on DirectShow players, so in order to be able to play all your files you need the right video and audio decoders installed already. Also coming with it is the Matroska muxer filter, allowing you to create Matroska files from DirectShow based muxing and capturing applications, such as ATV2000 or VirtualVCR_Matroska. Is there anywhere on the web site that can provide more detail as to the type of filters, dll's etc in this new pack?

If there's no info on the web site can somebody list the information here please?


Many thanks

[[Toff]]

Originally posted by Liisachan
Edit: Haali's splitter does have its forte.
In ffdshow's 'info' box, Gabest's 1.0.2.4 reports fps=25 even if it is not 25.0, like 23.976. I'm afraid 1.0.2.4 still has some potential problem... Haali's filter reports the fps correctly.
Yeah, I've fixed this bug, but I've sent several different version to Gabest and looks like he missed this fix :)
Though, I think that this fps value is only used if the splitter and the codec doesn't set timestamps on frame, which should not be the case with Matroska.

[Nibor]

Originally posted by SeeMoreDigital
Is there anywhere on the web site that can provide more detail as to the type of filters, dll's etc in this new pack?
If there's no info on the web site can somebody list the information here please?
You've probably already downloaded Matroska Pack Lite to see what's inside, but here is what it contains:

MatroskaSplitter v1.0.2.4 (2004-08-16)
MatroskaMuxer v1.0.0.9 (2004-08-21)
VSFilter v2.33 (2004-08-13)
CoreVorbis v1.0b6 (2003-12-15)

We could add a link to the ReadMe of each pack to the download page, well, I'll suggest this :)

Regards,
nibor

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by Nibor
We could add a link to the ReadMe of each pack to the download page, well, I'll suggest this :) Not a bad idea Nibor :cool:

Such information might be quite useful to some of us people who don't want filter clashes ;)


Cheers

[Liisachan]

Originally posted by Nibor
VSFilter v2.33 (2004-08-13)

Technically, VSFilter is 2.33b--2.33 modified so Haali's Splitter can load it.

[Nibor]

Originally posted by Liisachan
Technically, VSFilter is 2.33b--2.33 modified so Haali's Splitter can load it.
Yes, that's true..
It is labelled 2.33 because we can't change the version number without Gabest.
At least the date is new, so you can see it there.

[[Toff]]

Originally posted by Nibor
Yes, that's true..
It is labelled 2.33 because we can't change the version number without Gabest.
At least the date is new, so you can see it there.
As VSfilter has a property page I've modified the about box so it's 2.33b :)
For other modified filters, there is a compilation field in the file version info box that should show "Matroska pack 1.0.3".

[stephanV]

not that i mind or care, but:

why is there an audio encoder included in the pack (TTA), while you always have refused to include a video encoder with it (ffdshow/vfw)?

it seems a bit odd... but perhaps im justing missing the bigger point ;)

THX for the release! :)

[Nibor]

Originally posted by [Toff]
As VSfilter has a property page I've modified the about box so it's 2.33b :)
I stand corrected :) So it was my fault.. It's now corrected and will be right in the next version of the packs.

[Nibor]

@stephanV

The difference is, TTA is open source and does _not_ implement a set of techniques which require a license.
MPEG4 is such a set of techniques and to be allowed to distribute an encoder for it you would have to pay licensing fees to the MPEG consortium.. as long it is not 'educational only' as far as I know ;)

- nibor -

[stephanV]

ok, i understand... i forgot about that MPEG4 licensing stuff for a moment :rolleyes:

[Nibor]

@SeeMoreDigital

Now you can see what's inside each pack by clicking the link "List of components of this pack." on http://packs.matroska.org.
Thanks to robUx4 :)

nibor

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by Nibor
@SeeMoreDigital

Now you can see what's inside each pack by clicking the link "List of components of this pack." on http://packs.matroska.org.
Thanks to robUx4 :) Hey, hey, hey!

Thanks you guys... a welcome addition to the web site, I think you'll all agree :D

PS: Earlier today I did a test, inserting an anamorphic 720x576 XviD video stream (with chapters) into an MKV container using AVI-mux. When playing the file back in MPC (and WMP9) using Koepi's proposed new XviD DSdec filter... what more can I say? Perfect auto AR adjustment and playback... very nice :D


Cheers

[Gooberslot]

Unfortunately it looks like vsfilter still crashes under Win98 unless you disable pre-buffer subpictures which makes the cpu usage go through the roof. Guess this is never going to get fixed. :(

[Mosu]

Originally posted by Gooberslot
Unfortunately it looks like vsfilter still crashes under Win98 unless you disable pre-buffer subpictures which makes the cpu usage go through the roof. Guess this is never going to get fixed. :(

Sometimes I think that OS that are seven years old should not be supported anymore... At least I'm not surprised that developpers don't think it's worth their time to fix bugs for systems that old.

(I wouldn't try fix mkvtoolnix for gcc 2.7.x or libc5 either.)

[Gooberslot]

Sometimes I think that OS that are seven years old should not be supported anymore... At least I'm not surprised that developpers don't think it's worth their time to fix bugs for systems that old.
I knew I'd get a response like this. It's nice to know that you have the money to upgrade all the time but not everyone does. And yes there are many people that have computers that are perfectly capable of watching videos but not of running a newer OS due to low memory or incompatible hardware. Even if I didn't run Win98 I still wouldn't support a video format that wasn't cross-platform compatible.

Vobsub 2.23 works fine and there's really no reason that the newer versions shouldn't either except that the developers broke something. Probably something that wouldn't take 5 minutes to fix if they just tried.

[Tuesday]

7 years is an awfully long time in the computer world, and the Home Edition of XP must cost about $40 which isn't really alot of money considering it is vastly superior to '98, not to mention that you can probably get a copy virtually free from school/college/university/your-employer if you ask nicely and thats only if your particularly concerned about having a legal copy, i'm sure there's many places where you could find one for free if you're not concerned for such things.

Hey let's drag out the PII 266 with win95 and see how Doom III plays on it....

[Gooberslot]

What about all those P3's out there that only have 128mb of memory, hell some of them may only have 64mb. Running anything but Win98 would be painful with that little memory. Yet a P3 >=500mhz is perfectly adequate for video playback as long as you're not talking HDTV resolutions here.

Isn't MKV supposed to be an open, crossplatform format? As it stands it isn't.

[Teegedeck]

Welll... Nobody is forced to rely on Win98 these days... I switched to Linux for my serious work on a 400 Mhz PC. In contrast to Windows, Linux is for free (installation-CDs can for example be lend from a friend or university legally), very user-friendly(!) in its popular distributions and while it may not support as many graphic-adapters as XP (as if this was a problem with an old PC) it still is more compatible than Win98 these days... Matroska and XviD run on Linux, too.

Also, Gobberslot, accusing Mosu of being ignorant of the needs of Win98-users is not justified. I've hardly seen any developer more responsive to the demands of users! It is his right to voice his thoughts about Win98. Just ask him nicely if you want something from him, OK?

We've had other developers turning away from the community and from their work for the community because of just such behaviour and I don't want to see that happening again.

[Mosu]

Originally posted by Gooberslot
I knew I'd get a response like this. It's nice to know that you have the money to upgrade all the time but not everyone does.

:) Ok, my response was really BEGGING for the usual OS war. Sorry about that.

My point is that both (you and Gabest or developpers in general) are in the same situation. You don't have the money to upgrade. Developpers don't have the time to fix things every time. See we don't get paid for what we do. And we can't just make a day have 25 hours so that we can fix each and every bug. Bug hunting takes time. Unless it's an obvious bug it can take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours to find one bug. It is especially difficult if bugs happen on systems that we don't even use (anymore).

(This is all general talk. I'm not Gabest, but judging from how reachable he is and that most if not all fixes in the latest release come from Toff I'm not holding my hopes up that your particular bug will be fixed any time soon.)

[Mosu]

Originally posted by Gooberslot
Isn't MKV supposed to be an open, crossplatform format? As it stands it isn't.

Wohooo, hold your horses. Is it open? You bet it is! The specs are all available, almost all tools that handle Matroska files are Open Source.

Crossplatform? Definitely! Matroska tools ( = creation / editing utilities, playback software) are available for several platforms: Windows (98, ME, 2000, XP, 2003), Linux (several distros ship that software precompiled, otherwise you can compile from hand), several BSD variants, MacOS X, even BeOS. You have a problem with one specific filter on one OS version. You can hardly say Matroska isn't crossplatform just because of that...

[robUx4]

No it's not. It won't run on my Thomson TO7 and not even on my mobile phone ! And you claim it is cross-platform ?!!!

;)

[Gooberslot]

Welll... Nobody is forced to rely on Win98 these days... I switched to Linux for my serious work on a 400 Mhz PC. In contrast to Windows, Linux is for free (installation-CDs can for example be lend from a friend or university legally), very user-friendly(!) in its popular distributions and while it may not support as many graphic-adapters as XP (as if this was a problem with an old PC) it still is more compatible than Win98 these days... Matroska and XviD run on Linux, too.
I have Gentoo Linux installed and it is way slower than any version of Windows I've tried. Maybe if you use one of those minimalistic window managers it's faster but not if you try to use Gnome or KDE. Not to mention no matter how hard I try I can't get decent looking fonts but that's a whole 'nother issue.

Originally posted by Mosu

My point is that both (you and Gabest or developpers in general) are in the same situation. You don't have the money to upgrade. Developpers don't have the time to fix things every time. See we don't get paid for what we do. And we can't just make a day have 25 hours so that we can fix each and every bug. Bug hunting takes time. Unless it's an obvious bug it can take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours to find one bug. It is especially difficult if bugs happen on systems that we don't even use (anymore).
I don't think this bug would be very hard to track down. AFAIK, 2.23 is the last version that works right under Win98 so just go back and see what changes happened between 2.23 and 2.24 that could cause this type of bug. There's probably not that much to look at. Of course I'm not a programmer so I could be wrong. If someone were serious about fixing it though I'd be glad to go back and try each version and find out exactly where it breaks.

Wohooo, hold your horses. Is it open? You bet it is! The specs are all available, almost all tools that handle Matroska files are Open Source.
Is vsfilter open source?

[Mosu]

Originally posted by Gooberslot
Is vsfilter open source?

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82303&package_id=84359
and
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/guliverkli/guliverkli/src/filters/transform/vsfilter/

[[Toff]]

Originally posted by Gooberslot
Vobsub 2.23 works fine and there's really no reason that the newer versions shouldn't either except that the developers broke something. Probably something that wouldn't take 5 minutes to fix if they just tried.
The main problem is to have win98 installed.
Well, I guess no developper use Win98 as their main system, because it's very fragile, it can crash on any bug you make while you developp a program. It's very boring to have to reboot 3 time a day.

Now imagine if I would like to try to fix this bug.
First i need to install win98, that mean i need to repartition my system, and win98 is picky it wants to be on first partition, so that's gonna put a reall mess.
Then i need to reinstall the whole developpement environnement, Visual .NET 2003 and the DXSDK.
Hmm looks like VC2003 doesn't even run on Win98 : http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/productinfo/sysreqs/default.aspx

So you see it's not 5 minutes, it's really time consuming and it's a really boring work to do.

Looks like the easiest thing would be to do some remote debugging with vmware or with a second computer running win98.

[thoralf]

Originally posted by Gooberslot
Yet a P3 >=500mhz is perfectly adequate for video playback as long as you're not talking HDTV resolutions here.
Well, when it comes to video playback, about your only choice with this rather old hardware would be mplayer, since all the bloat bundled with windows (directshow etc.) will definitely slow your output down to something like 10 fps or so, depending on your graphics card. mplayer does support matroska, btw.
Even with a PIII/500MHz you are not bound to use microsoft products. Whatever blend of linux will run quite happily on this machine - admittedely, it doesn't make sense to fire up kde or star office, but still, get yourself a decent window manager and your're set ...
Windows 9x definitely isn't a decent OS, and neither gabest nor msou are to blame for that. So it might be a good idea if you look out for alternatives instead of blaming others of not doing enough to satisfy your special needs.

Isn't MKV supposed to be an open, crossplatform format? As it stands it isn't.
That's exactly what I'm talking about ...

[Tuesday]

To add further weight to the anti-98 argument, even M$ no longer fully supports win98, they stopped running the WHLQ certified driver scheme for it some months ago.

Also, WinXP will run quite happily on a PIII 500 and 128mb, especially if you tell it to turn off most of the eye-candy. Okay you may have problems running more than one big application simultaneously but hey, you couldn't even buy that system anymore.

[Gooberslot]

I thought we were done with the OS war; guess not. :)

The main problem is to have win98 installed.
Well, I guess no developper use Win98 as their main system, because it's very fragile, it can crash on any bug you make while you developp a program. It's very boring to have to reboot 3 time a day.

Now imagine if I would like to try to fix this bug.
First i need to install win98, that mean i need to repartition my system, and win98 is picky it wants to be on first partition, so that's gonna put a reall mess.
Then i need to reinstall the whole developpement environnement, Visual .NET 2003 and the DXSDK.
Hmm looks like VC2003 doesn't even run on Win98 : http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/p...qs/default.aspx

I imagine if I were a developer I'd already have a multi-boot setup. Heck, I'm not a developer and I still have 3 OS's installed.

Also, WinXP will run quite happily on a PIII 500 and 128mb, especially if you tell it to turn off most of the eye-candy. Okay you may have problems running more than one big application simultaneously but hey, you couldn't even buy that system anymore.
I disagree. I have a Celeron 900 with 192mb of ram and I feel XP is way too slow and bloated. I'd hate to think of running it with 128mb. Win2k is nice but unfortunately my sound card doesn't sound as good under Win2k so that's really what's keeping me from switching. It's not as if I like Win98. It's especially horrible if you try to do any bittorrenting due to Win98's horrible networking.

I don't understand all the Win98 hate that goes on at these more technically inclined forums. I can understand if you don't like it but no one is trying to force you to use it and I don't understand the need some people feel to insult people who do. Or are completely unwilling to understand that some people have no choice for various reasons. This thread actually has not been nearly as bad as some which can get down right nasty.

[robUx4]

You may have noticed that we are all busy working on Matroska. Many things are hapenning these days. So installing an OS to fix a filter we didn't even develop is not really a priority.

edit: typo, grammar and all the rest

[DKDIB]

Gooberslot wrote:
> I have a Celeron 900 with 192mb of ram and I feel XP is way too slow
> and bloated.

I've got an Athlon (no-XP) 1000 MHz with 256 MB RAM and Windows XP works perfectly (without any themes, of course).

___


Please, stop climbing the mirrors...... :rolleyes:

[Gaia]

I have Duron 900 with 256 mb of memory and XP runs without any problems.

I used to have 98se too but i had change to buy OEM version of XP very cheaply.

[Teegedeck]

...to add (actually repeat myself doing so) my 2 cents to this OT-OS-War stats; SUSE 9.1 (KDE) and OpenOffice run very fluently on my 400, err, 466Mhz-Celeron with an odd 224(or something) MB RAM. Better than Win2K.

[Hiro2k]

I just read a whole page on nothing but OT discuscion and I'm tired of it. No more!

It's the developers choice to program for whatever platform they want. As a user of an open source product you have no rights to complain about something that doesn't work on your system. You didn't pay for it and you shouldn't expect support for it.

[Liisachan]

Originally posted by Gooberslot
So, to get back on topic, is there anyway to get vobsub 2.23 to work with mkv files? What if the subs are external? I don't have win98 now, so I cannot test what Im saying myself, but MPC for Win98 might work better than VSFilter for Win98.

MPC has its own internal sub renderer working in VMR mode (youll need a newer DirectX, and youll need to change settings in options|playback|output). Especially, if you change "Texture Settings" down to 384x288 in the "Options" box, that'll be less CPU-intensive than DirectVobSub is, which might help if your CPU is not too fast. :) (Altho, the sub quality will be compromised.)

as a last resort, like you said, you might want to demux sub files from your MKVs, and try to play them as external files. At least SRTs should play on Win98, because they do play if they are in OGM.

[happy_harry]

YOu should have included the subtitlesource.ax filter from guliverkli!
I'm not able to playback may own beloved mkv files i have created through the last year (xvid+vorbis+vobsub+mkv).:angry:


the 1.0 corevorbis would be nice, too.

[robUx4]

Dunno about the subtitlesource.ax, but CoreVorbis 1.0 will be in the 1.1.0 pack that will include Haali's filter as the default one. We don't have a scheduled date for release. Maybe when the menu feature will be stable...

[happy_harry]

Are there any possibilities regarding a custom (just for me :cool: ) matroska full pack build? :D

[with subtitlesource.ax and corevorbis 1.0]

[[Toff]]

subtitlesource.ax is mainly used for muxing subtitles with graphedit.
Maybe you're mixing up with another filter ?

[robUx4]

Originally posted by happy_harry
Are there any possibilities regarding a custom (just for me :cool: ) matroska full pack build? :D

[with subtitlesource.ax and corevorbis 1.0]

:D
no!
;)

[happy_harry]

Originally posted by [Toff]
subtitlesource.ax is mainly used for muxing subtitles with graphedit.
Maybe you're mixing up with another filter ?

My fault! :(
Unregistered and everything seems fine... :eek:
It seems i've done something wrong, interesting.:confused:


Perhaps my new PSU is the cause :devil:

[Chainmax]

robUx4, would it be possible that you switched from CoreVorbis to CoreAAC in the Lite pack?

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by Chainmax
robUx4, would it be possible that you switched from CoreVorbis to CoreAAC in the Lite pack?

robux4 cant answer personally, so i will. We recently considered removing any decoder from the lite pack completely, for sure we wont add CoreAAC, due to possible license problems in some countries.

CoreVorbis was added because Vorbis is the only modern, lossy and patent free audio compression format we know of ( Wavpack to come soon ), and we wanted the lite pack to not only be small, but also to be 'clean' from a legal point of view. CoreAAC, as mentioned above, is not .....

[DKDIB]

Chris wrote:
> [...] Wavpack to come soon [...]

Great news! :D
Thanks a lot! ^__^

[Chainmax]

Originally posted by ChristianHJW
we wanted the lite pack to not only be small, but also to be 'clean' from a legal point of view. CoreAAC, as mentioned above, is not ..... [/B]
CoreAAC isn't completely legal? Wher can I read something about that? I browsed this thread and there's no mention of that...

[DKDIB]

Chainmax wrote:
> CoreAAC isn't completely legal?

Only sources are legal because AAC isn't patent free.
If you want to use a compiled version of CoreAAC you might buy a license from MPEG Industry Forum.

[cweb]

Originally posted by Mosu
Sometimes I think that OS that are seven years old should not be supported anymore... At least I'm not surprised that developpers don't think it's worth their time to fix bugs for systems that old.


Bugs are bugs anyway.
I still use win98 and will keep using it until I switch completely to Linux. Linux is more than 7 years old yet it is still supported by many!