Better Media Container Formats?

Posted by Cliff on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @10:45AM from the what's-in-your-file-format dept.

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."

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I must disagree by DemoLiter3 · 2003-10-14 10:59 · Score: 3, Informative

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.