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

[Alexander Strange]

On Nov 2, 2010, at 8:32 PM, Aurelien Jacobs wrote:

> 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.

Matroska can only link other matroska files. mov's data references don't imply anything about the referenced file, so you can use it for anything you want.
Except that it can't reference TS files, because IIRC they don't have contiguous packets in the file. So even that would still require copying data out of the original file.