[MPlayer-dev-eng] Nut vs. matroska

[D Richard Felker III]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2004 at 12:37:47PM -0400, Jason Tackaberry wrote:
> I've been somewhat loosely following the discussions about Nut's design
> (they've been hard not to notice, anyway :)) and the question that's
> been lingering on my mind the past while is "Why not Matroska?"

RTFA... :)

> Obviously I'm not interested in starting a flame war.  I'm not in the
> know about this, and I'm genuinely curious as to what the MPlayer
> hackers find wrong with Matroska and how Nut differs in principle.

In principle, we find the tag-based "EBML" structure and the hacks to
keep it from wasting too much space (lacing or whatever they call it)
bad design. It requires a lot of code to mux and demux.

In practice, the remaining critical flaws in Matroska are:

- Only one time base for the whole file, so you either have to store
  incorrect timestamps or else use an insanely fine-grained timebase
  (gcd/lcm tricks) that will waste lots of space in overhead.

- File size is considerably bigger than it needs to be. I would rather
  have that space for additional bitrate (quality) instead of wasting
  it on the container.

Rich