Widescreen suggestion

TommyRude · Post by **TommyRude** » Sat Aug 21, 2004 1:31 pm

B frames and field/frame encoding are codec dependent. An Xvid AVI and an Xvid Matroska file have the same encoding limitations and advantages.
I've never tried to stream an Ogg or matroska file, so I won' comment on that.
As for 4gb files, I'm assuming under NTFS you can play back/record under the 4tb (is it 4? I dunno since I neva' seen a drive that big) file size limit. I can't say for sure cuz I've never used an AVI file greater than 2gb. Incidentally, for distrobution, why would you WANT a filesize greater than 4gb? Unless you wanna cap a copy of Ishtar to Xvid, I don' think the issue is gonna come up any time soon.

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Sat Aug 21, 2004 2:27 pm

TommyRude wrote:B frames and field/frame encoding are codec dependent. An Xvid AVI and an Xvid Matroska file have the same encoding limitations and advantages.

They depend on the codec to support such things, yes, but container support must also be there. Please read the provided link: an MPEG-4 video stream using B-frames cannot be muxed as-is into an AVI container for the reasons described in the link I posted; it must be hacked in.

XviD streams in Matroska do not have to go through any sort of reordering process, as the support for B-frames is already there. Additionally, Matroska, and other modern containers, have support for arbitrary referencing: that is, instead of having a frame depend on the previous and/or next frame, you can have a frame n depend on some frame n +/- m. It's some seriously neat stuff that AVI really doesn't have a hope in hell of adopting.

As for 4gb files, I'm assuming under NTFS you can play back/record under the 4tb (is it 4? I dunno since I neva' seen a drive that big) file size limit.

You can, but as I said, it, too, is a hack.

Incidentally, for distrobution, why would you WANT a filesize greater than 4gb? Unless you wanna cap a copy of Ishtar to Xvid, I don' think the issue is gonna come up any time soon.

You're assuming that the only use for video files is online distribution, which is false. I habitually work with multi-gigabyte files for editing: sometimes dumps from DV cameras, and I've started playing around with using OpenEXR for capturing the results of video tweaking that requires such precision, i.e. extremely fine color tweaks.