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Have they bothered to come up with a decent easy to use encoder/decoder?

Well, here's a list. Some are free, some (like Sorenson Squeeze) cost money. VLC can also transcode to WebM. Handbrake does support VP8, but to a Matroska container (WebM is a subset of Matroska).

At this point, WebM is a closed codec because there are not enough specs and no standard for which someone can create a compatible codec of their own.

WebM is Matroska, Vorbis, and VP8. Matroska and Vorbis are already well documented, and Google is at least trying with VP8, having submitted a draft RFC to IETF.

it requires the video to find the first keyframe, and then play from there.

Ever noticed a delay in changing the channel on digital cable or satellite TV, or jumpiness when rewinding or fast-forwarding a DVD? A lot of that is waiting for the next keyframe. There is a tradeoff between bitrate and seek granuarity because more seekable encodes have to use more keyframes. In fact, a few codecs have an option to have a frame incorporate motion relative to multiple keyframes. Such a "B-frame" can use ordinary keyframes (I-frames), semi-keyframes predicted from prior keyframes (P-frames), future frames (the P-frame or I-frame after a B-frame), and even a long-term reference frame (a golden frame). If a scene uses a golden frame across multiple shots, good luck jumping into the middle of that scene.

Using ranges to try to stream is a massive, massive hack.

Or in other words, a "steaming pile of hack". But MKV already has cueing data, and Xiph is working on an Ogg index for more efficient seeking. The <video> element would reference video data URIs at multiple levels of detail, and a player would download each video's index.

That would be Matroska is not designed for streaming.

Only the first paragraph is an actual citation, as it stands it looks like your attributing the rant that follows to the link. Either way I fail to see how the difficulty of initially implementing Ogg Theora is related to continuous use of the existing implementation. Ogg Skeleton is in the works to fix the seeking problems and Matroska is designed for streaming.

It's less a matter of better/worse, and more a matter of different. This is a little complex but we will try ad explain.

and

Will Matroska be streamable? Yes, but low bitrate streaming like streaming Vorbis, will always be better in Ogg. This is because their design is for different purposes.

Are we to believe that they have no clue about container formats?

Ogg/Vorbis/Theora are unencumbered and free. No "deals" need to be worked out.
Ogg/Vorbis/Theora has reasonable quality and compression.
It can be placed into a MKV container http://matroska.org/, also unencumbered and free.

You are kind of comparing wrong things here. Both MKV and Ogg are merely containers (and H.264 can be placed inside MKV container too, and is usually done so).

Also, Theora and H.264 aren't technically equivalent. Theora is kinda there, but it misses many features, is more heavy on hardware and requires a larger bitrate to get the same results. It also completely misses support for B-frames, variable frame rates, interlacing, and larger than 8-bits bit-depths. It also loses out because the creators have chosen to maintain backwards compatibility in cost of being technically superior.

Another thing that manages to create more support for H.264 is that blu-ray, PS3, DVB (digital television in europe, including cable) and several other services and devices already support it.

I must be stupid.

Ogg/Vorbis/Theora are unencumbered and free. No "deals" need to be worked out.
Ogg/Vorbis/Theora has reasonable quality and compression.
It can be placed into a MKV container http://matroska.org/, also unencumbered and free.

Why would any end user select anything other than Theora/Vorbis codecs when given the choice? Google and Youtube have an opportunity to "don't be evil" and put an end to proprietary codecs being the default media format. It won't alter anything in the proprietary world, since they will always insist on DRM.

When was the last time you heard an end user happy about DRM? Well, when? NEVER.

Come on google, step up. Use Theora/Vorbis and MKV containers to significantly reduce the hold that proprietary formats have on your FLOSS OS using customers. Heck, if you do, I'll even stop using Scroogle .... maybe. Further, Apple and Microsoft can use the same codecs under the same terms that you or I can. For FREE. Talk about fair.

Now that I look at it, it's a pretty impressive list:

http://www.matroska.org/technical/specs/tagging/index.html

Somehow I've never felt the need to embed the metadata in the video file itself. I usually make an .nfo to go along with it.

First of all, Matroska is an open spec, and most implementations (including the reference implementation, libmatroska) are Open Source (lgpl for libmatroska).

Mkv supports B-frames, Variable bit rate audio, Variable frame rate, Chapters, and Subtitles. Not all containers support all of these, and AVI only supports any of those with workarounds, modifications or just nasty hacks.

The mpeg container can't do chapters or subtitles, and obviously only holds media in the mpeg (1 or 2) format.

MP4 has limited chapter and subtitle support and only deals with mpeg media (basically 1, 2, and 4 ASP/AVC).

Ogg/ogm is designed for simplicity, streaming and specifically for Vorbis and Theora (although most/all other codecs can be used), while Mkv is meant as a completely general-purpose distribution container, and wants to replace avi, asf, mp4, mov, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matroska
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_container_formats
http://www.matroska.org/technical/guides/faq/index.html
http://xiph.org/container/
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t10426.html

For one small crowd of the internet (anime watchers), h.264 in MKV is the de-facto standard for soft-subs

Actually, you're wrong there. The de facto standard there is ASS (or more politely SSA, but you have to love the name of the library libass), and SRT. MKV just proves to be a very handy container supporting ASS which was designed with various typographic features in mind (colors, positioning, etc, which is such a requirement for subtitling cartoons that I can't fathom how I spent my younger years staring at white text on the television). You can use any of the supported codecs, including MPEG-1 or 2 (heavens forbid), Theora, or whatever is supported.

incompetant

Your incompetence at spelling is showing.

Why burn a copy? You can just rip & re-encode it (x264) to an MKV-file on an (external) harddrive, and play it using popcorn hour or similar. That way you can also take your movie collection with you when you visit friends.

Well, let's reffer to wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec

"A codec is a device or program capable of performing encoding and decoding on a digital data stream or signal."

Do you know the Matroska Project?
http://www.matroska.org/

It's an Audio/Video container format, it does not define how the video is compressed in terms of algorithms and whatever, but it does add useful meta-data - nontheless it is a CODEC!

some kind'a expert you are...

Wenzenbach, Germany - Having found the AVI video format lacking, GNAA decided to search for a hot new container format, for use in releases of all GNAA video, including upcoming subtitled versions of Gayniggers From Outer Space.

GNAA president and A/V wizard timecop immediately turned to the opensource commmunity, the first place anyone would look for high-quality, well-supported software. A few Google searches later, he stumbled across the Matroska container format, and it was love at first sight.

"I've alyways supported open standards, and I was really excited once I found them. [Matroska] It's basically another competing media container format, like AVI, an envelope in which there can be many audio, video and subtitles streams, allowing the user to store a complete movie in one single file. This ensures that the audio and video can be played in most media players. As long as they manage to download the libraries and DirectShow filters needed, compile them, and then you're good to go." said timecop. "Of course, you can't demux all the streams in a .mkv, so it's less than worthless, but I mean, this is a format Gay Niggers can really get behind. There are at least 4 developers working on it, and TENS of users release video in .mkv format."

Upon finding that the sole distribution site for the sources he needed was down, timecop delightedly added "welcome ot openfuckingsource." Upon discovering that the latest version of the source wouldn't work properly under Windows, he congradulated the developers on sticking it to "The Man" [Bill Gates], adding "I assumed people around here had enough sense to give up on dead alternative OS's [Windows] around the time BeOS took a trip down the shitter."

GNAA member godspeed added "ROFL. Matroska is developed by Gay Niggers, how can we, the GNAA, not support it? We've been searching for a container format that has the feature that once you put something into it, you can never ever take it back out except for playback, so Matroska meets our needs perfectly. FRIST POST!!!!1one"

Matroska developers were busy writing a multimedia framework for BeOS and not available for comment.

About Matroska

Matroska aims to become THE Standard of Multimedia Container Formats. It was derived from a project called MCF, but differentiates from it significantly because it is based on GBML (Gay Binary Meta Language), a binary derivative of XML. GBML contains all the useless features of XML in a obscure and overengineered binary format, impossible to parse without obfuscated binary parser libs, and definitely not "human readable". GBML enables the Matroska Development Team to gain significant advantages in terms of future format extensibility without breaking file support in old parsers and allows them to push the limits of the gay video frontier. Some of the notable video codecs which have been used with Matroska include "RealVideo9" and "XVID".

Stated goals include creating and documenting a modern, flexible, cross-platform compatible Audio/Video container format, in combination with an open codec API, to form a free and open media framework, as well as establishing Matroska as the opensource alternative to existing containers such as AVI, ASF, MOV, RM, MP4, and MPG, however due to limited developer time, all current efforts are focused on getting Matroska running under BeOS. "Who needs to use a format everyone can already use, which is well supported by ALL modern OSes? Our opensource shitfest will soon replace the well-established, useful container formats."

About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY ?
Are you a

Matroska, the container format, which is not and has never been a codec, is licenced under the LGPL... It is also an Open Standards project, meaning that a company could create their own source using the specification rather than the LGPL source code and do whatever they want with it... There are also BSD-licensed tools available...

The Ogg bitstream is also hated by just about everyone who knows anything about media file formats. If you're going to propose a new standard Free media format, please use something like Matroska or NUT instead.
And the answer to your question is: no, Snow and Dirac can't be easily inserted into Ogg. Ogg's inability to handle arbitrary codecs is one of the reasons I don't recommend Ogg.

I actually prefer Matroska, but I'd also like to mention that Apple's MOV container is pretty open and well documented (PDF warning), unlike Microsoft's crap.

Doing these things on a standard WinXP installation is a daunting task for most people, myself included.

Aside from trying to be a PVR (which wasn't mentioned by the parent comment) the PC can do all of those things trivially either with software that came with it, or with the addition of one glomp of software: The Matroska Playback Pack:

Most of the hard work is being done by the great ffdshow decoder Filter based on FFMPEG and enabling playback of

• DivX 3/4/5
• XviD
• WMV7/8
• H.264 (MPEG4 AVC)

but the pack also adds playback support for

• Vorbis using FFDShow (for Ogg Vorbis audio files, install also the Ogg Splitter from Tobias Waldvogel)
• AAC and AAC+SBR (HE-AAC) audio, using FFDShow
• AC3 audio, using FFDShow
• FLAC lossless audio, using CoreFLAC
• Wavpack another lossless audio codec supporting hybrid mode (with + without loss)
• TTA another lossless audio codec
• Subtitles, using vsfilter (DVobSub)

You can also get realvideo support (why?) with the real alternative codec, and Quicktime with the quicktime alternative.

Now, I might be wrong, but chances are that what you got instead of Ogg Theora compressed files were Ogg Media Files (.ogm).

OGM is a container format for audio/video that supports multiple subtitles (just like you mentioned) and multiple audio tracks. From what I personally know, the video is usually compressed with XviD and the audio with Ogg Vorbis.

(see also Matroska which does the above, and more)

another promising container is matroska (.mkv)
but it isn't widley used and thus out of the scope of this thread, but it as a lot more features than any other stuff in the parent's post

If there's ever anything you want to know about video encoding, Doom9 is a good place to go.

Binary XML is nothing new, as I wager that many people here are already using it, albeit unknowingly.

One of the earliest projects that has tried to make a binary XML (as far as I'm aware) was the EBML (Extensible Binary Meta-Language) which is used in the Matroska media container.

Wenzenbach, Germany - Having found the AVI video format lacking, GNAA decided to search for a hot new container format, for use in releases of all GNAA video, including upcoming subtitled versions of Gayniggers From Outer Space.

GNAA president and A/V wizard timecop immediately turned to the opensource commmunity, the first place anyone would look for high-quality, well-supported software. A few Google searches later, he stumbled across the Matroska container format, and it was love at first sight.

"I've alyways supported open standards, and I was really excited once I found them. [Matroska] It's basically another competing media container format, like AVI, an envelope in which there can be many audio, video and subtitles streams, allowing the user to store a complete movie in one single file. This ensures that the audio and video can be played in most media players. As long as they manage to download the libraries and DirectShow filters needed, compile them, and then you're good to go." said timecop. "Of course, you can't demux all the streams in a .mkv, so it's less than worthless, but I mean, this is a format Gay Niggers can really get behind. There are at least 4 developers working on it, and TENS of users release video in .mkv format."

Upon finding that the sole distribution site for the sources he needed was down, timecop delightedly added "welcome ot openfuckingsource." Upon discovering that the latest version of the source wouldn't work properly under Windows, he congradulated the developers on sticking it to "The Man" [Bill Gates], adding "I assumed people around here had enough sense to give up on dead alternative OS's [Windows] around the time BeOS took a trip down the shitter."

GNAA member godspeed added "ROFL. Matroska is developed by Gay Niggers, how can we, the GNAA, not support it? We've been searching for a container format that has the feature that once you put something into it, you can never ever take it back out except for playback, so Matroska meets our needs perfectly. FRIST POST!!!!1one"

Matroska developers were busy writing a multimedia framework for BeOS and not available for comment.

About Matroska

Matroska aims to become THE Standard of Multimedia Container Formats. It was derived from a project called MCF, but differentiates from it significantly because it is based on GBML (Gay Binary Meta Language), a binary derivative of XML. GBML contains all the useless features of XML in a obscure and overengineered binary format, impossible to parse without obfuscated binary parser libs, and definitely not "human readable". GBML enables the Matroska Development Team to gain significant advantages in terms of future format extensibility without breaking file support in old parsers and allows them to push the limits of the gay video frontier. Some of the notable video codecs which have been used with Matroska include "RealVideo9" and "XVID".

Stated goals include creating and documenting a modern, flexible, cross-platform compatible Audio/Video container format, in combination with an open codec API, to form a free and open media framework, as well as establishing Matroska as the opensource alternative to existing containers such as AVI, ASF, MOV, RM, MP4, and MPG, however due to limited developer time, all current efforts are focused on getting Matroska running under BeOS. "Who needs to use a format everyone can already use, which is well supported by ALL modern OSes? Our opensource shitfest will soon replace the well-established, useful container formats."

About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY

Damn... damn them to AOL. With Shoutcast I got rid of my radio (literaly) and my TV time has been cut waaay back in favor of NSV (Nullsoft Video, think shoutcast for video) and sold the TV in my computer room in favor of NSV.

I'm thinking its a good time to build an OSS replacement for ShoutCast/NSV. Based on Matroska mabey.


Open Source, being necessary to security and innovation of a free system, the right of the people to alter and copy shall not be infringed.

Wenzenbach, Germany - Having found the AVI video format lacking, GNAA decided to search for a hot new container format, for use in releases of all GNAA video, including upcoming subtitled versions of Gayniggers From Outer Space.

GNAA president and A/V wizard timecop immediately turned to the opensource commmunity, the first place anyone would look for high-quality, well-supported software. A few Google searches later, he stumbled across the Matroska container format, and it was love at first sight.

"I've alyways supported open standards, and I was really excited once I found them. [Matroska] It's basically another competing media container format, like AVI, an envelope in which there can be many audio, video and subtitles streams, allowing the user to store a complete movie in one single file. This ensures that the audio and video can be played in most media players. As long as they manage to download the libraries and DirectShow filters needed, compile them, and then you're good to go." said timecop. "Of course, you can't demux all the streams in a .mkv, so it's less than worthless, but I mean, this is a format Gay Niggers can really get behind. There are at least 4 developers working on it, and TENS of users release video in .mkv format."

Upon finding that the sole distribution site for the sources he needed was down, timecop delightedly added "welcome ot openfuckingsource." Upon discovering that the latest version of the source wouldn't work properly under Windows, he congradulated the developers on sticking it to "The Man" [Bill Gates], adding "I assumed people around here had enough sense to give up on dead alternative OS's [Windows] around the time BeOS took a trip down the shitter."

GNAA member godspeed added "ROFL. Matroska is developed by Gay Niggers, how can we, the GNAA, not support it? We've been searching for a container format that has the feature that once you put something into it, you can never ever take it back out except for playback, so Matroska meets our needs perfectly. FRIST POST!!!!1one"

Matroska developers were busy writing a multimedia framework for BeOS and not available for comment.

About Matroska

Matroska aims to become THE Standard of Multimedia Container Formats. It was derived from a project called MCF, but differentiates from it significantly because it is based on GBML (Gay Binary Meta Language), a binary derivative of XML. GBML contains all the useless features of XML in a obscure and overengineered binary format, impossible to parse without obfuscated binary parser libs, and definitely not "human readable". GBML enables the Matroska Development Team to gain significant advantages in terms of future format extensibility without breaking file support in old parsers and allows them to push the limits of the gay video frontier. Some of the notable video codecs which have been used with Matroska include "RealVideo9" and "XVID".

Stated goals include creating and documenting a modern, flexible, cross-platform compatible Audio/Video container format, in combination with an open codec API, to form a free and open media framework, as well as establishing Matroska as the opensource alternative to existing containers such as AVI, ASF, MOV, RM, MP4, and MPG, however due to limited developer time, all current efforts are focused on getting Matroska running under BeOS. "Who needs to use a format everyone can already use, which is well supported by ALL modern OSes? Our opensource shitfest will soon replace the well-established, useful container formats."

About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY

Wenzenbach, Germany - Having found the AVI video format lacking, GNAA decided to search for a hot new container format, for use in releases of all GNAA video, including upcoming subtitled versions of Gayniggers From Outer Space.

GNAA president and A/V wizard timecop immediately turned to the opensource commmunity, the first place anyone would look for high-quality, well-supported software. A few Google searches later, he stumbled across the Matroska container format, and it was love at first sight.

"I've alyways supported open standards, and I was really excited once I found them. [Matroska] It's basically another competing media container format, like AVI, an envelope in which there can be many audio, video and subtitles streams, allowing the user to store a complete movie in one single file. This ensures that the audio and video can be played in most media players. As long as they manage to download the libraries and DirectShow filters needed, compile them, and then you're good to go." said timecop. "Of course, you can't demux all the streams in a .mkv, so it's less than worthless, but I mean, this is a format Gay Niggers can really get behind. There are at least 4 developers working on it, and TENS of users release video in .mkv format."

Upon finding that the sole distribution site for the sources he needed was down, timecop delightedly added "welcome ot openfuckingsource." Upon discovering that the latest version of the source wouldn't work properly under Windows, he congradulated the developers on sticking it to "The Man" [Bill Gates], adding "I assumed people around here had enough sense to give up on dead alternative OS's [Windows] around the time BeOS took a trip down the shitter."

GNAA member godspeed added "ROFL. Matroska is developed by Gay Niggers, how can we, the GNAA, not support it? We've been searching for a container format that has the feature that once you put something into it, you can never ever take it back out except for playback, so Matroska meets our needs perfectly. FRIST POST!!!!1one"

Matroska developers were busy writing a multimedia framework for BeOS and not available for comment.

About Matroska

Matroska aims to become THE Standard of Multimedia Container Formats. It was derived from a project called MCF, but differentiates from it significantly because it is based on GBML (Gay Binary Meta Language), a binary derivative of XML. GBML contains all the useless features of XML in a obscure and overengineered binary format, impossible to parse without obfuscated binary parser libs, and definitely not "human readable". GBML enables the Matroska Development Team to gain significant advantages in terms of future format extensibility without breaking file support in old parsers and allows them to push the limits of the gay video frontier. Some of the notable video codecs which have been used with Matroska include "RealVideo9" and "XVID".

Stated goals include creating and documenting a modern, flexible, cross-platform compatible Audio/Video container format, in combination with an open codec API, to form a free and open media framework, as well as establishing Matroska as the opensource alternative to existing containers such as AVI, ASF, MOV, RM, MP4, and MPG, however due to limited developer time, all current efforts are focused on getting Matroska running under BeOS. "Who needs to use a format everyone can already use, which is well supported by ALL modern OSes? Our opensource shitfest will soon replace the well-established, useful container formats."

About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY ?
Are you a

Wenzenbach, Germany - Having found the AVI video format lacking, GNAA decided to search for a hot new container format, for use in releases of all GNAA video, including upcoming subtitled versions of Gayniggers From Outer Space.

GNAA president and A/V wizard timecop immediately turned to the opensource commmunity, the first place anyone would look for high-quality, well-supported software. A few Google searches later, he stumbled across the Matroska container format, and it was love at first sight.

"I've alyways supported open standards, and I was really excited once I found them. [Matroska] It's basically another competing media container format, like AVI, an envelope in which there can be many audio, video and subtitles streams, allowing the user to store a complete movie in one single file. This ensures that the audio and video can be played in most media players. As long as they manage to download the libraries and DirectShow filters needed, compile them, and then you're good to go." said timecop. "Of course, you can't demux all the streams in a .mkv, so it's less than worthless, but I mean, this is a format Gay Niggers can really get behind. There are at least 4 developers working on it, and TENS of users release video in .mkv format."

Upon finding that the sole distribution site for the sources he needed was down, timecop delightedly added "welcome ot openfuckingsource." Upon discovering that the latest version of the source wouldn't work properly under Windows, he congradulated the developers on sticking it to "The Man" [Bill Gates], adding "I assumed people around here had enough sense to give up on dead alternative OS's [Windows] around the time BeOS took a trip down the shitter."

GNAA member godspeed added "ROFL. Matroska is developed by Gay Niggers, how can we, the GNAA, not support it? We've been searching for a container format that has the feature that once you put something into it, you can never ever take it back out except for playback, so Matroska meets our needs perfectly. FRIST POST!!!!1one"

Matroska developers were busy writing a multimedia framework for BeOS and not available for comment.

About Matroska

Matroska aims to become THE Standard of Multimedia Container Formats. It was derived from a project called MCF, but differentiates from it significantly because it is based on GBML (Gay Binary Meta Language), a binary derivative of XML. GBML contains all the useless features of XML in a obscure and overengineered binary format, impossible to parse without obfuscated binary parser libs, and definitely not "human readable". GBML enables the Matroska Development Team to gain significant advantages in terms of future format extensibility without breaking file support in old parsers and allows them to push the limits of the gay video frontier. Some of the notable video codecs which have been used with Matroska include "RealVideo9" and "XVID".

Stated goals include creating and documenting a modern, flexible, cross-platform compatible Audio/Video container format, in combination with an open codec API, to form a free and open media framework, as well as establishing Matroska as the opensource alternative to existing containers such as AVI, ASF, MOV, RM, MP4, and MPG, however due to limited developer time, all current efforts are focused on getting Matroska running under BeOS. "Who needs to use a format everyone can already use, which is well supported by ALL modern OSes? Our opensource shitfest will soon replace the well-established, useful container formats."

About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you G

Even better (because we're talking more of these "popular open source things" and stuff):

Ogg (either hackily or properly) or Matroska.

Matroska is a A/V container (think AVI MOV ASF) that is aiming to be THE format to which all others will be compaired. HTTP and RTP streaming OK. Network glitch resistant. Totally Open. DVD style menuing and almost at version 1.0. I have been following the A/V open source projects for some time and these two (Martoska and XviD) are the biggest things since sliced bread. We finally have the tools to do online TV like we have had online radio for a few years now.

Be advised... XviD is brutal on the encode. a 720x480 29.970fps video 1 hour takes my celeron 1000 4-6 hours to compress with all the quality settings turned up. But the decode is not that bad in terms of CPU power and at 2kps-4kbs you are looking at some DAMN fine video. Even at 700kbps it is looking good. Best compressor on the planet (at least that I have messed with).

I assume you are familar with Ogg Vorbis which is compairable to AAC in terms of quality/bitrate. It makes a great companion to XviD inside a Matroska container

Not very surprising. Considering that both AAC and Ogg Vorbis (and possibly flac, but I can not find the page) support 5.1.(search for 'surround')

Heck, I would not be surprised if apple will push some kind of 5.1 headphones, and thus claim superiority over mp3 for portable music format.

But then again, why do I care? I do not even listen to music, and video is already AC3 (aka dolby digital surround?) encoded.

Ogg WHAT?
Are you talking about using Ogg Vorbis as the audio codec? Yes, it is very good. I wouldn't use anything else for either my CD rips or DVD rips.
Or are you talking about the bastardisation of the Ogg container format that is the OGM container format? Do some googling. From the mailing list postings I saw, the Ogg guys aren't too happy about this effort by one windows programmer to hack the Avi/VfW information into the Ogg container format. If that's what you're referring to, and using, I recommend you instead look at the Matroska container format. It's much more flexible and is slightly more efficient space-wise than OGM. Mplayer supports it, don't know about Xine. There's a Matroska splitter/demuxer thingy for windows, don't know about Mac OS/X support.

Matroska is up there with the worst names too. What is it with multimedia file formats having lame names?

Thanks for the links! BXML was new to me but it seems very similar to EBML which is used and developed by the Matroska-team. I wonder what their pros/cons are...

Then that would be Matroska, wouldn't it?

Ffdshow is an easy replacement, as it's based on a Linux project, ffmpeg.

The extent of my encoding comes from recording TV or VHS tapes and throwing a few filters at them for cleanup and encoding. So I've never had a chance to become familiar with what features avisynth has. Some people over at Doom9's Linux forum have mentioned getting Avisynth running in wine.

Tmpgenc should be a pretty easy replacement. Transcode seems to be a favorite for mpeg2 encoding. There was a problem when I first started using Linux, which slowed mpeg encoding to a snails pace for a while, and I've never found a chance to get back to see how it works when fully functional. A lot of peoplel swear by it though, and it's feature list is pretty impressive. Avidemux, as well as quite a few other programs also provide mpeg1 encoding, I think through ffmpeg.

Everything in VirtualDub/VirtualDubMod except video capture should work fine under wine and that's what I used for quite a while before Avidemux appeared. The design and functionality are very similar to virtualdub, and it also includes encoding to mpeg1.

One of the two best media players for Linux, Mplayer, should be noted to have better support for matroska, in cvs, than is available for the format under windows. And these tools can be used for creation and editing of matroska files.

For capture from a tv card, I use nuppelvideo, and then use avidemux to edit and convert to a smaller format.

http://www.matroska.org/

It was made to be more extensible for the future. (This is subjective as the future isn't here, but it was a top priority to ensure nearly anything could be stored in Matroksa for the next 10 years.)

Support the future of video and audio encoding : matroska as container ( http://matroska.org )

- extensability for future use
- menues ( like DVDs have )
- chapter entries
- selectable subtitle streams
- selectable audio streams
- fast seeking in the file
- high error recovery
- streamable over internet ( both HTTP and RTP )

And best of all, the sourcecode of all the libraries developed by the matroska developement team will get licensed under GNU GPL and QPL license types. How can you go wrong?

http://www.matroska.org/

Support the future of video and audio encoding : matroska as container ( http://matroska.org )

- extensability for future use
- menues ( like DVDs have )
- chapter entries
- selectable subtitle streams
- selectable audio streams
- fast seeking in the file
- high error recovery
- streamable over internet ( both HTTP and RTP )

And best of all, the sourcecode of all the libraries developed by the matroska developement team will get licensed under GNU GPL and QPL license types. How can you go wrong?