Matroska mplayer-cvs support [ebuilds inside]

borh · Last edited by borh on Wed Jul 02, 2003 3:06 pm; edited 1 time in total

Edit: scroll down the post for newer ebuilds.
Matroska is a new, extensible open standard Audio/Video container format (like .avi or .ogm). More information at www.matroska.org.

I have made ebuilds for libebml, libmatroska, mkvtoolnix and have made a new mplayer-cvs ebuild version so you can actually do something usefull. Vlc 0.6.0 also has support for Matroska files, but I do not have it working yet.
Right now, finding .mkv files on the internet is still rare, but will probably become more common once Matroska matures (and creating them is also fun

). Download links:

All these ebuilds are tagged ~x86 (unstable). Untar them to your PORTDIR_OVERLAY. For mplayer you have to have the "matroska" USE flag set.

rvalles · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Feb 2003 Posts: 121

I've been talking with someone from Matroska project.
I've learned that Matroska is designed for editing, and really bad for streaming or anything else. Why? It does rely on having always one frame per page, this way it's easier to cut/edit a Matroska file, but on the other hand, it makes it hard to parse (particulary, it produces memory hogs because of some frames being very hug, therefore increases cpu requirements while demuxing, too) and hard to stream, for the same reason.
This is a stopper for playing them in embended devices. It would make it hard to be implemented for those resource-limited play-it-all divx+xvid+ogg+vorbis+mp3+dvd consumer products.
I would recommend using ogg instead, that does everything Matroska does despite the one frame/page thing that it's only annoying unless those corner-cases, and it's a currently established format, and a free one. It does have a very small overhead (unlike AVI), good support for variable bitrate codecs, and ultrafast seeking, and comes from the people at xiph.org, the ones who made ogg-vorbis and are developing a new video codec, too. (http://www.theora.org)
By the way, mplayer has been suporting the ogm format for a long time, you can rip in ogm using dvd::rip and we've got ogmtools in portage, too.
Note: Some people call video ogg's ogm. Actually ogm and ogg are exactly the same, it's just that some people (not me) prefer that to distinguish video+audio from just audio.

borh · Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2003 12:25 pm Post subject:

To clear up some confusion between ogg, ogm and matroska:

1) .ogg is specifically designed for streaming audio (vorbis). ogg was not designed for video or any other thing.

2) .ogm is an implementation of adding other things to .ogg by Tobias (now a developer for Xiph). But since there are no official specs and the sources have not yet been released (they have been promised for more then half a year), the situation is currently unclear what will happen to ogm.

3) Most likely, the folks at Xiph will change the specs when they addopt ogm for video/audio/etc content (though they said they would keep backwards compatibility for playing ogm files).

4) Matroska is designed for any type of codec, designed for editability, has a flexible design and is gaining support for things such as chapters, tags, menus, audiogain, subtitle (text and image). It remains unclear if ogm will support such things as menus or image subtitles.

rvalles · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Feb 2003 Posts: 121

It seems there are many misconceptions about Ogg. I wasn't sure about all of them, so I've checked their websites and asked some people in the xiph IRC network about that:

xiphmont · n00b Joined: 29 Jun 2003 Posts: 3 Location: Somerville, MA

ChristianHJW · Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2003 10:21 am Post subject:

I am not here to start a flame war, but talking about facts :

- matroska does currently already support SSA and SRT ( UTF8 ) subtitles, while Tobias' OGM does only do ASCII SRT subs, so you can not use different languages if these are no on the same codec page. I dont know Theora's approach here, but IIRC i read on theora-devel ML that they introduce a new subs format with it, and are searching for somebody to write a subs editor for it. When browsing the Theora specs pages with a search engine for 'SSA' it returned with null. Image subs are already functional in our Windows based tools, but we are not there on Linux yet, thats why we dont release that yet.

- matroska may not be designed with streaming in mind, but there are ways to make it do that fine, my devs reminded me about this recently. After all, the 'normal' video user will be more interested is easy editing and nice storage features IMHO, so we dont think the missing streamability is an important issue preventing matroska's wide spread use.

- matroska playback on hardware devices is NOT worse than from Ogg, after all you need a complete frame in the buffer to be able to decode it, so i dont get rvalles point here.

- matroska playback support was recently added to VLC from the Videolan.org people, leaving Xine the only big OSS player without MKV support. VLC is available for Linux, win32, MacOSX and BeOS.

- Tobias Waldvogel, the original OGM creator, is currently busy with a day time job and becoming a software engineer same time, and this doesnt leave him any time to contribute anything to either Xiph or Corecodec. The last who actually seemd to be in contact with him was Jack Moffit from Xiph, asking him about finally releasing the sources for the OggDS DirectShow filters. Jack told me he was glad he finally managed to get a reply from him, so i am not sure what i would call that if people still claim he is a 'Xiph developer' . Also, in the actual libogg there is no trace of OGM support, in whatever form. AFAIK Xiph people are working on a tool to transmux OGM into Theora compliant files. Monty may tell us if they have different plans. I also want to state here that Xiph's information policy about what Theora actually is and will be, has to be called 'poor' IMHO ( sorry Monty, but why did you lock development into the cellar ? ).

- 50% of our development time is currently invested into the crappy matroska DShow parser filter, struggling with the weired things M$ people have built into this framework to make developers life a pain.
If we wouldnt care about this ourselves, like Xiph people prefer to do it, we had all the ccurrently missing features already done, like menues, chapters, file attachements, flexible EDC/ECC for mode2 form2 burning, etc.
However, we know that a working and opensource DShow parser filter is the main key to get widespread support and usage from the fansubbers and DVD rippers, as most of the movies are played on Windows

- we were currently in the very lucky position that Gabest' the subtitles god, became interested in matroska and started cooperating with us to get perfect subtitles support in matroska. He also made a DirectShow muxer filter, allowing people to mux all kinds of formats into matroska files.

- matroska is getting good response from the video world because there is an excellent editor tool for it in VirtualdubMod for Windows ( works nice on wine BTW )

- we can mux AAC audio already into matroska files, and we have AAC SBR in preparation, with support from the Ahead people ( Nero ). For playback the Corecodec people made a DirectShow filter called CoreAAC, the first of its kind to support AAC 5.1 playback

@ Monty : its nice seeing you replying to a thread like this, a couple of months ago you wouldnt have bothered. Yes, we left 'vapourware status' on May 1st, and since then the list of new added features grew dramatically, thanks to a well written libmatroska and good docs on how to use it.

Lets stay fair to each other, i guess we always were in the past ( you are NOT Emmett

), and i loved to keep things like that. However, feel free to 'amuse yourself to smack our "fanboys" if they get out of hand', telling untrue things about OGG

.....
_________________
Support matroska as container andUSF as subtitles standard

borh · Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2003 1:28 pm Post subject:

I'm starting to regret my post about ogg/ogm as it seems I didn't have all the right info. It was not my intention to start any flame war between ogg and matroska :roll:

. I made the ebuilds so I could play matroska files on my computer. In fact, I'm perfectly happy with ogm ( I have made personal backups of DVD's to ogg and I like it much better than avi).

But still, thanks to the rapid progress I have seen with matroska, I now personally prefer it to any other container format. It helps that I'm also an anime fan and have recently heard alot about matroska from groups I like. As in many things Open Source, the project most actively developed is most interesting to many people.

So *please*, lets refrain from any more bad talk about ogg and stay on topic. The title is "Matroska mplayer-cvs support". I'd like to hear if anybody has tried the ebuilds yet!

robUx4 · n00b Joined: 29 Jun 2003 Posts: 3

Hello, I'm one of the persons who built the matroska format (spec and code). I know this is not the place for such a public debate, but since someone started "comparing" apples and potatoes here in public, I feel that some truth is worth here.

robUx4 · n00b Joined: 29 Jun 2003 Posts: 3

rvalles · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Feb 2003 Posts: 121

rillian · n00b Joined: 29 Jun 2003 Posts: 1 Location: London UK

Christian, thanks for at least posting in the rational direction. Nonsense like what robUx4 added about Ogg isn't exactly inspiring.

ChristianHJW wrote:

ChristianHJW

Pamel · Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2003 5:41 pm Post subject:

xiphmont · n00b Joined: 29 Jun 2003 Posts: 3 Location: Somerville, MA

xiphmont · n00b Joined: 29 Jun 2003 Posts: 3 Location: Somerville, MA

Pamel · Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2003 6:32 pm Post subject:

robUx4 · n00b Joined: 29 Jun 2003 Posts: 3

smokeslikeapoet · Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2003 8:49 pm Post subject:

How did I miss this discussion before now? robUx4, xiphmont, ChristianHJW, Is there any forum you guys don't frequent? I started using Gentoo about 6 months ago, in case you're wondering where I've been.

It's good to see the healthy discussion goes on. IMHO, Xiph ignored feature requests from Windows users like me. (Used to be, anyway). And generally ignored the whole user population when it came to 6 channel ogg vorbis development. Mastroka development , however, has continued to be open to discussion for developers and users. With all due respect, Xiphmont and Emmett don't want to be bothered with the little questions from people like me, so I've generally lost all intrest in the Xiph projects, although the vorbis codec does have its strenghths, and 2 channel ogg + vorbis combo is great for streaming.

I can't wait to try out Mastroka for Mplayer. Hopefully now I'll have a multimedia container I can live with.
_________________
-SmokesLikeaPoet

Folding@Home

spyder482 · n00b Joined: 01 Jul 2003 Posts: 1

OK, first, let me say that I hate forum fights such as this. I don't really like posting to such discussions but I feel that there is a lot of misinformation here. I am one of the members of the original MCF team and now the Matroska team. I love this appearance that Xiph tries to give off. You say you are wanting freedom in the media world etc.. This is true as far as I can tell. I like Vorbis. I have used it since WAY before most people did. I use it because it is a good codec developed by incredible programmers and best of all, I can read to see how it works if I feel so inclined. The thing I see as funny(if not sad) about Xiph is that you make your organization out to be so great for the people yet you don't really listen much to them.

Also, I have personally experienced the gossip meetings on public IRC channels that would occur. Maybe this is different now. However, when I first joined MCF, I frequently visited #vorbis. I never thought much of some of the conversations there. But one occasion stands out in my mind. It was only shortly after I had joined MCF, someone came to #vorbis and asked about storing video in Ogg. The people in the channel at that time had a good time laughing and saying that OGM was NOT Ogg and never would be. They said there would be video in Ogg sometime but OGM would not be it. I still didn't think much of this. Obviously Xiph didn't care about video in Ogg at that point. Then someone mentions MCF to them(not me yet) and they all start the "reinventing the wheel" story. "Ogg can do all of that and more" etc. etc.. Yet they still take no action to let users communicate anything to them about the subject. No response was given when someone asked about a feature in Ogg. By this point I became active in public discussions and then I hear that Theora will change everything. Ogg was designed with video in mind! Wow! What great news. Anyway, I'm obviously busting at the seems with joy.

It just strikes me funny that Ogg was designed with video in mind and you are wanting people to help implement it but little effort is made on the communication end.

I guess it could be bad handling/administration or whatever. This may have all been fixed by now. The major downfall that Ogg had from this is that people see Matroska as a format for them. They see Ogg as a format for them but designed for Xiph. I am not wanting to be yelled at or bombarded with :evil:

. I just want to let you know why certain things have turned out the way they have. I like Matroska despite the "fact" that Ogg can do everything Matroska can. I say "fact" because though you say all of this there is no documented spec saying this. As the Xiph IRCers said to me many times during arguments that started as inquiries, you have to have something to show, otherwise you have nothing.

Xiph development always seems hidden to me. You just suddenly pop out a creation and then there is big news, chatter, etc. but then nothing, no news.... Anyway, I just wanted to say that. I really see now, as a friend on IRC just said, "seems open source has some progress to be made". Xiph gives the appearance that it is some corporation developing software for some use that we don't know of but then claiming on a front that it is for the OpenSource community and users. I know this is not the image Xiph is trying to convey. But it is happening. I hope you see the point in this meandering message.

Spyder

PS: Good to see you around SLAPoet

smokeslikeapoet · Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2003 9:28 pm Post subject:

I tried to install mplayer-cvs today, and I'm getting this error

borh · Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2003 1:41 pm Post subject:

smokeslikeapoet: this is a problem with sourceforge cvs access. It happens with all ebuilds that use sourceforge cvs. Browsing sf.net seems to be alright, but when I ping www.sf.net I get packet loss. Just keep on trying (it might take as many as >20 tries to get through).

Nylan · n00b Joined: 14 Jun 2003 Posts: 38

I'm getting this error:

borh · Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2003 5:04 pm Post subject:

Belgabor · n00b Joined: 03 Jul 2003 Posts: 63 Location: Germany

@borh: You mention in the build you have trouble making it work without wxWindows. Mosu (Moritz Bunkus) told me he checked and it should work without. He also told me he wont reg on yet another forum

So if you want to sort this out with him you can either contact him by mail or come to #matroska on irc.corecodec.com

Cheers

borh · Posted: Fri Jul 04, 2003 9:39 pm Post subject:

I have uploaded a new mkvtoolnix ebuild which is a bit cleaner.
Belgabor:
There was never really any problem with wxGTK support (the problem was only how to turn it off if you already had wxGTK installed, but why would anybody not want it then...).

Another thing related to mkvtoolnix. Has anybody got mkvinfo working? I'm getting the following error: "Error: Could not set the locale 'en_US.UTF-8'. Make sure that your system supports this locale.". I tried it on another computer at home and I got the same error. I'm still working on the problem, although I'm not sure where to look.