[gst-devel] Gstreamer and matroska - the opensource answer to VideoforWindows/AVI and Quicktime/MOV ?

[Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro]

  I wish I could be sufficiently well informed to make insightful
comments about this issue.  Since I'm not, I can only comment on the
name.  'matroska' is a really poor name.  It doesn't mean anything to
most people.  And what would the adopted file extension?  That's a
rhetorical question, as I'm sure it would sound bad.

  Why can't open source projects come up with better names?  GStreamer,
for example, is a good name.  It is all about media pipelines.  For a
multimedia container format, why can't you come up with a better name,
like Extensible Media Stream (.ems), or something like that.

  Another question, how does the matroska container relate to the
generic (and also poorly named) OGG container?  Is it really technically
better?  I'm just asking, I have no idea.

  Best regards.

A Qua, 2004-02-18 às 15:27, Christian HJ Wiesner escreveu:
> Hi,
> 
> this email is more to be seen as a brainstorming rather than an 
> announcement or the like. My excuses go to the Gstreamer guys about 
> copying their list, i dont know if they are interested in this kind of 
> thinking at all.
> 
> I was recently becoming aware that matroska's only hope to become 
> established as standard, if this is ever going to happen, is versatility 
> and flexibility. In short, to become a 100% replacement for good old 
> AVI, currently the most used container format out there, probably on 
> rivalled by MPEG. The reason this container is/was used so much can be 
> explained when knowing its the standard container for VfW ( Video for 
> Windows ), Redmond's old Media Framework. http://fourcc.org and 
> http://abcavi.com give a pretty good impression how many different audio 
> and video codecs had been developed for this framework in the past, 
> obviously because of M$'s domination in the Multimedia scene and the 
> sheer number of copies out in the wild. Now, as we all are well aware, 
> both VCM ( the video codec API ) and ACM ( the audio codec API ) are 
> completely outdated and can not support most of the modern compression 
> formats anymore, leading to a number of problems and incompatibilities, 
> of which VBR MP3 async and the 'packed bitstream' hack are the two most 
> obvious to name.
> 
> The successor of VfW, DirectShow, has never played the same role if it 
> comes to video editing and video creation/encoding, due to a number of 
> pretty bad limitations with respect to accessing the chain once its 
> started. In short, DShow is wanting to much automatism here, stealing 
> developers the possibilitites they request if they code a video 
> application based on it. For this reason, DShow is today mainly used for 
> playback and capturing.
> 
> The big 'competitor' to VfW has always been Quicktime in the past, with 
> MOV as the standard container. It is very well implemented into Mac's, 
> and like DirectShow for Windows it can be seen as a fixed part of the 
> OS. Its coming with a nice, open video and audio codec API also, which 
> is much more powerful then VCM/ACM, and same is valid for the container. 
> However, there is no working implementation of Quicktime ( the framework 
> ) for Linux, at least i am not aware of such, and the Windows 
> implementation of it sucks badly ( not to mention its payware if it 
> should do more than just playback ).
> 
> I was recently thinking that Gstreamer and matroska together could 
> become the opensource counterpart to both of the framework/container 
> combinations listed above, and am asking for opinions on this ? Once we 
> really succeed in porting Gstreamer to win32 ( maybe even MacOSX in 
> future ? ), and come up with a powerful but not overly complex codec 
> API, sitting on top of the gstreamer plugin API ( via a wrapper ), do 
> you think codec developers could actually consider supporting this API, 
> chosing MKV as their 'preferred' container ?
> 
> DivX.com have plans to release DivX6 from AVI and VCM, as well as from 
> the MPEG4 standard in general. They have plans for a new, DivX6 specific 
> container format i heard, and want to establish themselves as a new 
> video standard that way, even with hardware support. Good luck, thats 
> all i can say here. They would probably be better off to use their 
> existing market power and support us to become the first true x-platform 
> media framework and media format ? The reason DivX became so big is 
> simply because it could be used from Virtualdub, and in AVI as a well 
> supported container. If they now try to establish their own stuff, 
> supported only by a small number of apps, and everything coded by 
> themselves, they are very likely to fail IMO. Look at Real Networks, 
> they understood this and went all the way back, trying to offer Helix as 
> another universal framework, advertising it in the OSS scene even, and 
> with great x-platform support, but still limited in terms of supported 
> formats in it, and with only one ( for win32 sucky ) player for it.
> 
> I am well aware gstreamer doesnt need matroska at all. Your way is 
> clear, becoming the best media framework for the Linux world, and you 
> guys wont mind if your project is ported to other OSes also, as this can 
> only help you to achieve your goals, for sure. You could also settle for 
> MOV as standard container, as there are currently no features realized 
> in matroska that MOV cant do also, or have no standard container at all. 
> On the other hand, you could win a couple of contributors and fans with 
> such an 'alliance', if you allow me to name it like that. Opinions 
> please, and use the 'reply all' button if i may ask for that, to copy 
> both lists. Stupid idea ? Useless ? Possible ? Tell me what you think ....
> 
> Regards
> 
> Christian
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Gustavo João Alves Marques Carneiro
<gjc at inescporto.pt> <gustavo at users.sourceforge.net>
The universe is always one step beyond logic.