[MPlayer-dev-eng] container format

[D Richard Felker III]

On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 04:22:09PM +0000, Mark Zealey wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 04:48:58PM +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> 
> > anyway, first draft of the MPlayer container format is in DOCS/tech/mpcf.txt
> > comments VERY welcome :)
> 
> Few ideas:-
> 1) From a purely readability perspective - could you put your type definitions
>    at the top of the file...

Probably not worth the cvslog spam to change...

> 2) Why does sz always have to be at least 1 character long - why cant it just be
>    a null?

Good question.

> 3) Much as i don't like the ogg container format - could we have something like
>    theirs whereby all of the title and author and so on are just stored in one
>    text area, a header type with some standard headers like 'Author:' and
>    'Title:', \n-seperated, or maybe \0 seperated with a byte-count before the
>    text.

Hmm, at first I was thinking this was sorta nonsense anyway, but I
guess we want our format to be good for audio-only files as well as
movies. This brings up another point -- repeating headers in
audio-only files could be a lot more expensive (percentage-wise) than
in movie files...

> 4) Possible use of compression on text, for example the headers (point 3) and
>    the subtitles.. The compression would be done on the whole text basis and
>    then maybe split up into the parts. Of course, the compression would only be
>    done where it was favourable...

For redundant information (tags), compression might be good. On the
other hand, I think it's a bad idea for subtitles. Compressed text is
much more susceptible to damage. Also, I'd like to be able to open up
the movie in a hex editor and fix minor typos or grammatical brain
damage in the subtitles without remuxing the movie.

Rich