[MPlayer-users] snow/vorbis/nut?

[Rich Felker]

On Fri, Mar 03, 2006 at 02:11:40PM -0500, marco wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> I was wondering if there have been any recent developments
> regarding snow and nut? Looking at the Changelog it seems
> that development of these technologies has stalled. Many
> months ago I asked about storing snow/vorbis streams in
> a nut file, is this still a possibility?

NUT is under heavy active development and may soon be complete.

I think snow still needs fairly much work (mainly it's just too slow
to be usable yet), but some of this work is being done. The recent
iterative motion estimation encoding stuff has drastically improved
quality to the point where it's very impressive, according to the
people who've seen it in action.

> If not, what is looking good? x264/vorbis/mkv? theora/vorbis/ogg?

x264/vorbis/mkv is definitely a decent choice.
theora and ogg should be avoided absolutely. theora simply has abysmal
compression compared to modern codecs, and ogg is the most completely
broken, useless container format out there. (quicktime/mp4 is also
very broken, but whereas qt is broken by virtue of including way too
much nonsense that does not belong and being impossible to implement
correctly, ogg/ogm just lacks all the information a container needs to
provide..)

Rich