MKV control track? (formerly: Playlist for OGMs?)

[Clock]

I'd like to know, if any of you know a way to create a playlist for multiple OGM-files.

Here's what I'd like to do: I want to burn multiple episodes of one show on one CD or DVD. They all have the same intro. But it's that kind of intro, that is not at the very beginning of each epsiode, but after some scenes. So I thougt about splitting each ep into three parts. Before intro, intro and after intro. Since the intros are the same, I could take the same file for all episodes and so save a lot of space.

But until now, I couldn't find an ideal way to do this. I've got OGM-files, video is Xvid, audio is one ogg-stream and theres also an srt-subtitle-stream.I usually play my videos with bsplayer.
Now, I can build bsplayer-playlists, which work, but the problems: works only with bsplayer and videos are played like three videos, which makes skipping hard.
Other way I thought about, was to merge the parts into one avisynth-script. Problem is, I'm no guru in avisynth, so I didn't manage to get the subtitles to work (besides, the audio was totally out of sync).

No I wonder, if there is no "official" way to achieve my goal.

Any help?

Please?

GUYS????

Thanks in advance.
Clock

[bond]

not possible with ogm, sorry

[Koepi]

You can make .asx playlists. A search on google will show you how the .asx is structured. This will be playable by many players then.

Cheers
Koepi

[Clock]

Hm, think I already tried that yesterday, but I'll look into it again.

"not possible with OGM"...Well, what would be the ideal configuration? Which Vid/Audio-Type in what kind of container within which playlist?

Thank a lot for your help...

Clock

[celtic_druid]

I would think that bond was refering to doing it just with ogm. A playlist like asx I would imagine would work about the same for any format, be it avi, wmv, ogm or whatever. Where as say mkv with control tracks, you would get what you want just from using mkv.

[iapir]

This feature was introduced a while back in Matroska by Haali. But only in a single file. Maybe it could work with file linking (that Haali's filter support too).

[Clock]

Okay, so I spent the last days looking for knowledge about MKV, and it seems like I might solve my problems that way.

Problem is, I hardly understand how to do stuff. Maybe it's my english, maybe the fact, that matroska isn't fully developed yet?

I tried some ideas with VDM and mkvtoolnix, but nothing really worked. I I try to explain what I am doing and just hope, that someone is able to help me in an understandable way:

I have a bunch of videos, which all have the same intro and outro. Now I thought, it must be possible to encode those two parts only once, and make the player of my choice (bsplayer for example) play them automatically.

Now i read pages about control tracks, but couldn't understand how to do it. Maybe, I think, it would work this way: putting all videos plus the intro and the outro into one MKV. Then defining chapters, and linking them the right way.

But I just can't figure out how to achieve this goal. A nice program would be great, but I also don't mind fighting with my editor, as long as I have a clue about what to do.

And I hope, that clue is not http://www.matroska.org/technical/specs/chapters/index.html
'cause that's far beyond anything I understand :-)

So big thanks already to anybody who is able to came up with a solution, program, helping url or whatever.

Clock

[Mosu]

"Control tracks" are not ready yet. We're working on implementing the whole menu issue at the moment, though. Steve Lhomme is writing a program to extract menus and tracks from a DVD and call mkvmerge on the whole stuff. The result should be one big file containing everything. He's about to start working on implementing menu playback on vlc, too.

[iapir]

Haali's splitter can support intro/outro sharing in the same file, but not external files.

Now I see in the logs of his splitter that he supports files splitting. Dunno if you can use that in coordination with "ordered" chapters (the feature mentioned above).

[Koepi]

Ok, so why not simply using a *.asx playlist which works every already now?

You can keep different files that way and encode the intro really only once, doing an asx playlist like this:

<ASX VERSION="3.0">
<Title>Episode 1</Title>
<Entry>
<ref href="episode1\beginning.avi"/>
</Entry>
<Entry>
<ref href="intro.avi"/>
</Entry>
<Entry>
<ref href="episode1\main.avi"/>
</Entry>
<Entry>
<ref href="outro.avi"/>
</Entry>
</ASX>

..and save that file as episode1.asx in the base-dir.

[Clock]

The main thing I don't like about the playlist idea, is that it troubles jumping/seeking through my video. But since it seems like the control track thingy isn't availabe yet (hope you won't need DVD, as I mostly talk about captured stuff...).

Thanks however and please, whenever matroska is fully done: explain all the features to us dummys :-)

Clock