Better Media Container Formats?

altaic asks: "Today I was looking for a container format to store my anime collection (multi-language audio and subs), and I discovered popular media containers actually suck. AVIs are a hacked mess and don't even support multiple audio tracks. OGMs are catching on, but they don't have an index, nor do they support variable framerates (the fps value is stored in the header). I found some info on the Matroska container, which looks really cool (it supports multiple subtitle streams, multiple audio streams, a slew of other nice features), as well as the very young MPCF (mplayer container format). I'd really like to hear about other people's experiences with newer, more useful media containers."

Comments

Ask Doom9

[DeadMeat (TM)]

Doom9's "New A/V Formats" forum is a good place to ask; besides the FAQs, there's a ton of technical expertise there (the programmers of OGM and Matroska filters and muxers sometimes hang about to answer technical questions).

The quick-'n'-dirty answer is that, as long as you've got muxers and demuxers for the formats you're working with, converting from one container format to another is generally lossless, so you don't really need to worry about losing data to an obsolete format. In this layman's opinion (I'm not an A/V software programmer, but I play one on Slashdot), Matroska looks like a good choice here, since you can mux practically everything under the sun into a Matroska file. But be warned that practically-speaking not all of the existing Matroska filters recognize data like chapters; in contrast, formats like OGM may not support as much metadata, but the existing filters generally recognize all of it.

QuickTime?

[RevAaron]

What about QuickTime? The format seems to be open, or at least known in various Free software libraries so that working with it is doable. You can use any number of codecs within a QT file, though.

And no, QT isn't one codec. There have been issues in the past about QT support on OSes like Linux- but that was because of a lack of support for the Sorensen codec that QT can use.

What are the limitations of QT? What does it do better or worse than AVI or the others? Myself, I've no clue, but would be intersted in finding out...

Try Quicktime or MPEG-4

[RalphBNumbers]

They're practically the same thing in terms of container formats, and they're so extensible it isn't even funny.

Want multiple overlapping video tracks, various text tracks (perhaps one for each language, with the machine auto selecting, or asking the user if you want), SMIL support for web integration, sprite tracks, static picture tracks, built-in realtime effects, user interaction, chapter markers, searchable subtitles, etc?
It's all there, and *MUCH* more. most of people don't have a clue how absurdly versatile that format is, it's done everything you've asked for 'since the '90s.