[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: Some cleanup about mencoder.

[Dan Christiansen]

On Saturday, January 18, 2003, at 05:28 PM, D Richard Felker III wrote:

[snip]

> As much as it's nonsense, you could want it... Think of
> ogg-inside-avi. BTW, before you say this is stupid and that one should
> use ogm instead, do a little research...with ogm, the stupid ogg page
> headers waste a lot more space than the whole avi index (and they
> don't make seeking easy like an index does!), the painfully
> complicated checksums waste a lot of cpu time decoding (and they even
> waste a good bit of time during streamcopy!), and the whole thing is
> just a hack.
>
> Even though ogg-in-avi is also a nasty hack (I don't even know if A/V
> sync works), perhaps it will someday be desirable to mux ogg into a
> good container format. Of course dropping the ogg junk and just using
> raw vorbis packets would be much nicer...
>
> Rich

Using file formats within other file formats seems to me like an 
inherently bad idea. I doubt that such files will ever be playable by 
anything but MPlayer (and maybe with some weird filters on Windows).  
If you don't like the Ogg format, you shouldn't be using it.

If you want a cross-platform file format that supports advanced 
features like various kinds of tracks and lots of them, you should 
consider MOV or MP4. They don't seem to add much overhead, and they can 
be played by most players. (Quicktime for Mac and Windows, WiMP w/ 3ivx 
for Windows and several open source players for other systems.) It 
might be better to switch to another file format instead of hacking AVI 
again.

Using raw Vorbis streams seems like the simplest and most logic 
approach anyway. Sort of minimizing the probability of error rather 
than maximizing it ;)

- Dan