[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: Flaming NUT

[D Richard Felker III]

On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 11:17:45PM +0200, ChristianHJW wrote:
> Peter Niemayer wrote:
> >What is really sad is that while the flame-wars move back and
> >forth between Matroska and NUT advocates, the damned obsolete
> >".avi" container remains the most used / best supported. 
> >There certainly are advantages in both directions, but the world
> >would be a better place if _either_ NUT or Matroska would take
> >AVIs place.
> >Peter Niemayer
> 
> I really wanted to stay away from this list completely, and especially 
> not reply to a thread being titled 'Flaming NUT' , but this post of 

:)))

> yours is so absolutely hitting the nail on its head, i have to express 
> my highest admiration to your point of view on that.
> 
> As a matter of fact, we have the perverse situation that so-called 
> 'hardware MPEG4 players' cant play MP4 files, but only MPEG4 video + 
> MP3/AC3 in crappy AVI container. How could this happen ?

I think part of the problem is that mpeg adopted an absolutely
horrible format (quicktime) as their "official" container for mpeg4.
Notice that all the popular players support mpeg-ps, es, etc. for
mpeg1/2. AVI was chosen as the container of choice by 'scene' people
because:

(a) Even though it's more limited than quicktime, it's a ton less
brain-damaged and bloated (in terms of how much you have to implement
to support it).

(b) The orignal "mpeg4" used by the scene wasn't even true mpeg4, but
microsoft's perversion of the draft standard which became known as
divx3. Since they were using ms codecs, it was natural to store the
stream in an ms format...

> Well, the 
> industry reacted to an existing demand, there were literally thousands 
> of potential customers having such files and looking for hardware 
> devices to play them. Most of those files had been created using 
> Virtualdub ( a VfW app ), a DivX codec ( a VfW codec ) and any MP3 ACM 
> codec, and of course the result had to be a crappy AVI file, because its 
> the standard container for the old VfW framework.
> 
> Do you think any of those users creating and spreading those files would 
> care about the technical differences between matroska and NUT ?

No, I don't, but I doubt they care about the differences between
Matroska and AVI either. That's why they're still using avi. They
don't even care about the differences between divx3 and mpeg4...

The important question, in my opinion, is whether the users creating
and spreading _Matroska_ files right now would know or care about the
technical differences between Matroska and NUT. I believe they will.

Originally I thought it was bad to have two competing standards for
the future of video containers, and that the better one should stomp
out the bad design. ;) I would still rather people use NUT than
Matroska, because there files can be slightly higher quality at the
same size, and contain more useful info (time base & no lacing) at the
same time. But the more people in different competing camps release
files in NUT _and_ Matroska, the sooner the idiots still using
avi/divx3 will wake up and see how stupid they're being...

> For that reason, we have realized long ago that the success of matroska 
> is 100% depending on the number and the quality of implementations 
> supporting it.

I agree that this is important. See the NUT release schedule thread.

> Right now, we are in the process to go one step further 
> and combine it with gstreamer, to form the frist truely open and 
> portable multimedia framework ( we ported gstreamer to win32 already ), 

Hmm, ffmpeg isn't an open and portable multimedia framework? MPlayer
isn't? I don't see how you can call this the first...

> with matroska as standard container, and based on that we want to launch 
> a video encoder and editor in the near future.

So do we, but based on the principles of NUT. (Although you can use
any container formats with it -- by "principles of NUT" I mean the
ideology about how timestamps and a/v sync should work, with exact pts
for every frame, etc.)

> Good luck with NUT Richard, but you should realize by now that you have 
> a long, long way ahead of you .....

Thank you, it's good that we can finally be civil about this.

Rich