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jerry1 · Jul 3, 2004, 08:20 PM

I'm trying to play a Matroska file (.mkv) file in Mac OS X. Tried MPlayer 2b6 and the sound is garbled and video is not played. Then tried VLC and got the audio properly but no video ...

I came across this page:
http://www.holwegner.com/software/#MKVToolNix

Downloaded the MKVToolNix and MPlayer 1.0pre3 (without gui). Installed both of them and I dunno how to run them via command line :o

Please HELP !

TIA

Millennium · Jul 4, 2004, 09:02 AM

Matroska is a container format, not a codec.

This is actually an important difference. Right now, the most popular video codec for Matroska users is RealVideo 10, the same codec used in the latest generation of RealPlayer. For audio, the popular choice is Ogg Vorbis.

Ogg is easy to port to Macs, because of the large amount of Open-Source code. RV10, however, is more problematic. There is no code to port, because it's all closed. Most Matroska players on Windows get around this by hacking their apps to use Real's DLLs. This is why you need RealPlayer installed in order to play most Matroska files. The problem is, no one has figured out how to do on the Mac yet.

I never figured out the point of Matroska anyway. MP4, OGM, and MOV can already do everything Matroska can do (and usually more), and all of these have open definitions and Open-Source code for using them. They're just re-inventing the wheel yet again.

jerry1 · Jul 5, 2004, 01:26 PM

Thank You Millenium for the explaining it in detail. Appreciate it very much. Thanks again !

The DJ · Jul 8, 2004, 01:27 PM

Originally posted by Millennium:

I never figured out the point of Matroska anyway. MP4, OGM, and MOV can already do everything Matroska can do (and usually more), and all of these have open definitions and Open-Source code for using them. They're just re-inventing the wheel yet again.

You are so right on everything else you said, though i DO need to soften this last bit though.

MP4 is not a completely free format. It is under patent by Apple and the MPEG4 group. Though the file format specification is standardized, it is not Open and not 100% Free (in the sense of Free Software). MOV is just a predecesor of MP4.

OGM is worse then avi. It is the most hacked together piece of **** on the face of the earth. It is suited for little else then streaming and a programmers and standard body's nightmare. However it WAS the very FIRST completly Free, Open, and Open Source a/v container. This icw it's Vorbis roots explains why it is reasonably popular.

Matroska is a beast. Reasonably effecient, very capable (on par with MP4) with some nifty features (attachments) and a lot of room for extension upon the base format. It's also a complete Free and Open Source solution which was created from the ground up. It combines the best of MP4 and OGM you could say. That is it's strong point from the FOSS community point of view.

Still it is the allrounder. Many people in the FOSS world think it's bloated piece of code. However this reaction is coming mostly from the mplayer and ffmpeg worlds, which honestly have better coding skills than standardization and usability skills.

Millennium · Jul 8, 2004, 02:18 PM

Originally posted by The DJ:
MP4 is not a completely free format. It is under patent by Apple and the MPEG4 group. Though the file format specification is standardized, it is not Open and not 100% Free (in the sense of Free Software). MOV is just a predecesor of MP4.

The patents, last I checked, covered the codecs but not the file format. Apple has no patents on MOV.

The DJ · Jul 8, 2004, 07:49 PM

Originally posted by Millennium:
The patents, last I checked, covered the codecs but not the file format. Apple has no patents on MOV.

But you can't just add theora support to the specification for instance. It's not controllable by anyone but MPEG group and Apple in that sense. You can do this with matroska.

DJ

Uncle Skeleton · Jul 8, 2004, 08:25 PM

Originally posted by The DJ:
MOV is just a predecesor of MP4.

I'm not going to get into the semantics of whether this statement is technically correct, but it's definitely misleading. Mp4 is based on mov, and mp4 is more recent than mov, but mov is hardly "just a predecessor" of mp4. More like mov was too complex to be adopted by cell phone manufacturers and too capable and flexible to be adopted by major content creators, so they stripped out all the advanced features, changed the names of some atoms and gave it a new name.

Mov is by far the technical superior (to mp4 and to any existing format that I know of), and suffers only from being associated with the mediocre QuickTime for Windows, in the eyes of the computing masses.

Uncle Skeleton · Jul 8, 2004, 08:31 PM

Originally posted by The DJ:
But you can't just add theora support to the specification for instance. It's not controllable by anyone but MPEG group and Apple in that sense. You can do this with matroska.

DJ

Sorry for the simplistic questions, but is theora a codec or a file format? If it's a codec, then why would you need to hard code it into your file format (although I've heard complaints from some developers that Matroska has all possible codecs hard coded for some reason)? And if it's a file format specification, what does it mean to add it to another file format specification? And finally, as a user, what good does it do me to be dependent on the Matroska devs to add new formats to the spec than to be dependent on Apple and MPEG to do so?

JonLech · Jul 9, 2004, 12:15 PM

Originally posted by Millennium:
The patents, last I checked, covered the codecs but not the file format.

MPEG-4 Industry Forum

Question: Simply using the MP4 file format is enough to incur the Systems royalty?
Answer: yes.

Jacke · Jul 9, 2004, 01:12 PM

Originally posted by JonLech:
MPEG-4 Industry Forum

Just so you know, MPEG-4 is not the same as Quicktime...

JonLech · Jul 9, 2004, 03:24 PM

Originally posted by Jacke:
Just so you know, MPEG-4 is not the same as Quicktime...

I'm well aware of that. On the issue of patents, any differences between the MPEG-4 file format and the QuickTime file format are not relevant.

The DJ · Jul 21, 2004, 07:10 PM

Originally posted by Uncle Skeleton:
Sorry for the simplistic questions, but is theora a codec or a file format? If it's a codec, then why would you need to hard code it into your file format (although I've heard complaints from some developers that Matroska has all possible codecs hard coded for some reason)? And if it's a file format specification, what does it mean to add it to another file format specification? And finally, as a user, what good does it do me to be dependent on the Matroska devs to add new formats to the spec than to be dependent on Apple and MPEG to do so?

Theora is a codec. Use the google.
Well for most formats you wouldn't need to hardcode the codec usage, as long as the fileformat is advanced enough. However some definetly require SOME consideration in the fileformat, because many codecs are just not that well designed to work out of their own file format. To go into the technicalities on this would exceed this discussion .

The difference is that ANY developer can be a matroska developer in contrast to NOT ANYONE being able to be a Apple developer.

Millennium · Jul 21, 2004, 07:32 PM

Originally posted by The DJ:
But you can't just add theora support to the specification for instance. It's not controllable by anyone but MPEG group and Apple in that sense. You can do this with matroska.

Theora is nothing more than a codec. In fact, its direct predecessor, On2 VP3, was in fact supported in QuickTime, and I believe you can still download the codec. You can put any codec you want into QuickTime format -it is, after all, just a container file- and anyone who has that same codec will be able to play it.

You do not "add support for codecs" into the MOV spec, because MOV isn't a codec. Anyone can add a codec whenever they want. This is, for example, how the Vorbis plugin for QuickTime was written. The same is true of 3ivx (whose proponents tend to use MOV) and the DivX plugin (yes, you can put DivX video into MOVs).

Nope; unfortunately for Matroska, most of their arguments hold no water. The only real reason to use it is Not-Invented-Here syndrome.

Uncle Skeleton · Jul 21, 2004, 08:32 PM

Originally posted by The DJ:
However some definetly require SOME consideration in the fileformat, because many codecs are just not that well designed to work out of their own file format. To go into the technicalities on this would exceed this discussion .

I can see why you'd think that, but I think we need to hear some of these technicalities. Like Millenium pointed out, without some actual explanation (technical if necessary), the argument that codecs need to be specifically added to a file format (especially one designed from the ground up to eliminate the need for the crutches and hacks of previous file formats), sounds like a pretty weak reason. I don't know of any other file formats that are dependant on codec (except for mpeg-4 and that is by design, not by technical limitation; if you want to tell me that the matroska devs intentionally designed the format so they could limit it to whatever codecs they want, that would be quite interesting indeed).