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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."
Multiple audio tracks AND multiple subtitle tracks can be muxed into AVI and play very well.
You'll need only these 2 tools to achieve this:
VobSub and MMSwitch
VobSub package contains the SubMux utility for muxing an AVI video, multiple audio tracks and subtitle files (in SRT, SUB, SSA and other formats) into AVI. MMSwitch will allow separate playback and easy selection of multiple audio tracks in any media player based upon DirectShow graphs, WMP for example.
In WMP, audio tracks and subtitle tracks can be then easily selected via context menu.
Well, if they are CDs you don't really care about, you can store them on a CD spindle. Otherwise, the old 5 1/4" floppy containers work fairly well.
You can also get some fairly nifty CD storage racks, like This one.
Oh, wait... You were talking about... Never mind.
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It was first raised in Feb2003 here.
The conversation died for a while, and then it was brought up again in March. (Although the conversation seemed to get bogged down on selecting a name for the format).
The format description is now included in the DOCS/tech directory of the mplayer tarball. Not sure whether any of it's actually implemented in the mplayer code.
Cool, but useless.
It may be that most media players can't deal with it, but the AVI format certainly supports multiple audio tracks, and it always has, as Google confirms. BTW, have you looked at MOV (QuickTime)? It's better than AVI, and it is better known than the other formats you list.
Take a look at mpeg4. On my machine (OS-X) I use a program called OpenShiiva (http://openshiiva.sourceforge.net/) to dump DVD's. It uses mpeg4 for the container and Xvid or 3vix/AC3 for the audio-video stream. As far as changing frame-rates on the fly I don't know if that type of thing is in the spec or not. As far as subtitles and multiple audio streams I think it will work just fine. However I'm not an expert so feel free to correct me on this. Nice thing about mpeg4 is the mpeg standard. Hopefully you will be able to encode with either Xvid,Divx,3vix,Apple or M$ and playback on any mpeg4 complaint player. Once again your millage may vary, i've read in the 3vix forum that Xvid isn't quite mpeg4 complaint and I would imagine most of the other codecs have similar idiosyncrasies.
On the other hand there is Mov or Quicktime. This format is very mature and will play on most anything that Quicktime supports. It does allow for subtitles and multiple audio streams.
Although I think ogm is the container of choice for anime lovers....
Zorton
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.
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...
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
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.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge