[FFmpeg-devel] Format for fast extraction (was: [PATCH] Dynamic plugins loading)

[Aurelien Jacobs]

On Wed, Nov 03, 2010 at 01:11:30AM +0100, Nicolas George wrote:
> Le tridi 13 brumaire, an CCXIX, Jean-Daniel Dupas a ?crit?:
> > (4) Using MPEG-4 and external references instead of rewriting a format
> > from scratch.
> 
> Could you give me more details about what kind of external references you
> are thinking about?

I don't really know details about mov, but indeed it is capable of
containing "links" to other files.
Matroska has some similar features. You can get a good idea of the
features here: http://mod16.org/hurfdurf/?p=8
One common use of this feature is to store a whole bunch of episode of a
TV serie, but store the opening theme only once in a separate file. Still
each episode will play fully, including the opening theme.
I think it would fulfill your usecase perfectly.

lavf don't support those features yet (neither in movnor mkv), but
patches would be welcome. I think the main problem is to decide of a
proper API to expose this.

> As a side note, I needed a format that could store the packets as demuxed
> from the DVB recorder: MPEG-2 video, MP2 audio, DVB subtitles.

Matroska should support all of this.

Aurel