Details of the new container format

Hi,

i am Christian and one of the administrators of the matroska opensource container project. The matroska container will allow for a huge variety of different video and audio compression formats to be stored in it, and we also have specified our own menue system ( based on the DVD menue system ).

We also can convert any DVD into a single MKV file already, keeping all of the content and menues, and using any supported compression formats for audio and video. Only problem we have right now is to add good playback support, we more or less gave up on DirectShow for this and are in the process to extend VLC http://www.videolan.org for this purpose.

I would like to know

- what opensource libs was used for RatDVD
- when code based on these libs will be going to be released
- if you will publish any details of your container format
- how you plan to circumvent DirectShow's limitation with respect to proper menue support

Thanks and best regards from Germany

Christian
matroska project admin
http://www.matroska.org

Hi Chris and the Matroska team,

First congratulations to developing matroska into the state where it is now. I was following the development from the very early stages and I must say that I am very impressed with it.

I think the one thing that matroska isn’t very well suited is to represent a complete DVD as intermediate format like ratDVD. Especially the step to go back to a DVD from the intermediate format I could imagine a being a problem. When you continue into this direction you will probably find that you need some more information (especially in-stream) than you collect today.

However, for everything besides DVD the matroska container (sometimes also MP4) is my format of choice. Thank you for doing this.

To answer your other questions:

•I have extended the libdvdnav. I have to clean it up a bit but will probably release it as open source this week.
•I hope to release the playback filters also this week.
•Yes, I will publish details about the format although I don’t know when I will get to that.
•I don’t understand the question about DirectShow limiting the menu support. Works fine for me…

I hope this answers all your questions. I will try to have a look at the forums from time to time, but please don’t expect me to have a standing conversation here because I’m too busy with v0.6 ;-)

Regards, Splinter

Hi splinter.dk,

and thank you very much for your answers, this clarified a lot. Here some suggestions :

As i told you in my original email, we are very close to releasing the new matroska menue system, which is heavily 'inspired' by the DVD menue system, for compatibility reasons expecially with respect to existing menue creation tools for DVDs. robux4 has coded a tool already called 'DVDMenuExtractor' ( source is in our SVN repository on http://corecodec.org/projects/matroska ), which will take any DVD and copy the complete menue structure as well as all tracks, etc., and make a XML file from that which can be used for muxing with a new version of mkvmerge/mmg.exe . Basically any supported codecs can be used for the audio/video/subs streams, and re-converting this MKV file into the original DVD is more like a reencoding job into codecs supported by the DVD standard, and not really a lot of work speaking of the menue structure.

We are very interested to learn more about the video codec you developed, and also want to offer to you that we could add native support for your video compression format into mkvmerge, so people could use your codec also in the matroska container. We could define a codec ID for you specifically, like V_RAT or whatever you prefer !

The biggest interest for us, and we admit that frankly, is to have a look at oyur DVD navigation filter. robux4 is now adding matroska menue playback support into VLC, because we felt that the M$ navigation filter is too heavily tied to the standard DVD audio/video codecs, and as such is more or less useless to us. On the other hand, we didnt have the time to create our own navigation filter, thats why we hope you will release yours under the terms of the GNU so that we can build our own filter, or maybe even merge efforts into a single one ( matroska pack on http://packs.matroska.org has more than one Mio downloads since some time now ) supporting both ratDVD and matroska menue system.

Of course, should you ever consider to add a MKV output mode to ratDVD, just give us a shout so we cna help you with that !!

Best regards

Christian
matroska project admin
http://www.matroska.org

Personally I don't see the point of ratDVD since nearly all of it's current features are soon going to get incorporated into Matroska anyway.

Please allow me to add, that the reason for me to post here was NOT to advertise the upcoming matroska tools, or to even convince people to stop using ratDVD. The other way around, we really hope to be able to learn something from the way the program works, especially with respect to the Dhow based navigation filter.

Another thing is, ratDVD works already, and we still cant play our files correctly, not even in VLC.

Regards

Christian
matroska project admin
http://www.matroska.org

hm from what people reported the .ratDVD format is a mpeg program stream (eg .mpg or .vob) inside a .zip

my question about the dvd menu storage tech to the ratdvd dev:
i wonder if ratdvd simply takes the vobs from the dvd (combines them to one) and basically replaces the a/v streams inside this vob and therefore is able to 100% keep the menu structures!?

sorry if this is a dumb idea, dunno much about dvd menu internals



edit:
chrishjw: lol, i told you he will ignore this

Then remove your links

... i would, but i don't see a 'edit' button :O ??

EDIT : Strange, there is an edit option for my latest post but ( i swear ! ) not for my old posts ?

why does he have to remove his links? he didn't do anything bad

GPL violation by ratDVD?, discussion:

http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/215044
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.ph...256#post693256

That's the way the forum works, you can only edit a post during a certain duration of time after you've created it. The moderators could tell you more but I think that's the jist of it. No need to edit anything anyway.