Flash?

Photoshop_degenerate · Post by **Photoshop_degenerate** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 4:05 pm

I was woundering if I could upload flash files. I've already made a proto-type vid using flash, and its not a video using vector graphics although that would be cool if someone put the effort into making one. Its kind of like a dvd where a short piece of video is played and then a menu pops up and you can watch the feature video or see previews, trailers, or have all sorts of extra info on the music video and maybe even web links. If you didn't know the newest version of flash alows for video importing. The quality of compresion isn't that great kind of like medium quality mpeg 1, but thats not the point. The point is to offer more with the video, and it's all in one file. Also I was woudering if anyone else would like to see a video with an interactive menu.

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 5:55 pm

A menu is worthless for an amv I think

I would recommend the matroska (www.matroska.org) container format, as it allows you to attach files and stuff onto the video, which sounds like what you are wanting to do, and in the future it will support menus as well.

Atvaark · Post by **Atvaark** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 10:17 pm

Zarxrax wrote:I would recommend the matroska (www.matroska.org) container format, as it allows you to attach files and stuff onto the video, which sounds like what you are wanting to do, and in the future it will support menus as well.

MPEG-4 can do all that. Few codecs implement it, but it's fully specified in the standard. I don't see the interest of reinventing the wheel, especially if a workgroup made of the world's best experts have already defined a public standard.

And this sentence in their mission statement shows that they don't know what they're talking about:
<i>- Establish Matroska as the opensource alternative to existing containers such as AVI, ASF, MOV, RM, MP4, MPG</i>

What's an open-source alternative to MP4? MP4 is a public standard. There's no source at all. There are implementations of MP4 that are already open source (ffmpeg...).

To me this sounds just like wasted time, and a more complicated user experience (playing video is already a mess, please, no useless new formats !).

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 10:25 pm

MPEG-4 is not open at all. It's tightly controlled just like MPEG-2. And MPEG-4 is TOTALLY different from Matroska anyways. Matroska is a container format. MPEG-4 is a specification for encoding video, that just happens to have it's own seperate container format.

Atvaark · Post by **Atvaark** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 10:46 pm

Zarxrax wrote:MPEG-4 is not open at all. It's tightly controlled just like MPEG-2.

When a standard is publicly available and has open source implementations, I don't think one can say it's not open.

Zarxrax wrote:MPEG-4 is a specification for encoding video, that just happens to have it's own seperate container format.

MPEG-4 is a container format, and a video format. I was talking about the container format. In fact, MPEG-4 codecs as we know them are a very partial implementation of MPEG-4. They implement the file format, but only accept video (MPEG-4 video) and audio chunks. I agree, that's pretty confusing. We should be talking about MPEG-4 video when talking about the video compression standard, and about MPEG-4 when talking about the multimedia file format.

Tab. · Post by **Tab.** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 12:17 am

Mpeg liscensing is a black art. That's all I'll say, because I don't know it (or care to) any better than most other people.

As far as a container though, Matroska and MP4 are diametric in purpose and design. MKV is meant to define an all-purpose container for storing and handling any type of stream you can throw at it. Thanks to EBML, its design is flexible enough to allow for this kind of scope. It's not as tightly-wired as mp4 is, but it has a lot of conveniences that MP4 lacks. MP4 is powerful, but not at all simple. You'll be hard pressed to find someone willing/able to script up the BIFS needed for simple subtitles, much less a fully-featured menu. And even with the backing of the Systems standard, you won't find much current support. Not to downplay mp4, it's a great standard. But both formats have their respective place and usefulness.

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 12:22 am

ambroise wrote:
Zarxrax wrote:MPEG-4 is not open at all. It's tightly controlled just like MPEG-2.
When a standard is publicly available and has open source implementations, I don't think one can say it's not open.

Those open-source implementations are officially designated as "for educational use only", since any commercial use could conceivably put the authors at risk. XviD does just that.

I agree with Zarxrax: I don't think MPEG-4 can be a truly open standard until any fear of litigation from developing an unlicensed implementation is struck out by MPEG.

ChristianHJW · Post by **ChristianHJW** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 10:47 am

Interesting read

... now pls. allow me to throw in my 2 cents :

And this sentence in their mission statement shows that they don't know what they're talking about:
- Establish Matroska as the opensource alternative to existing containers such as AVI, ASF, MOV, RM, MP4, MPG
What's an open-source alternative to MP4? MP4 is a public standard. There's no source at all. There are implementations of MP4 that are already open source (ffmpeg...).

This was taken from our homepage, and it was written by me, a non-native english speaker. I apologize if what i wrote implies that the other containers are closed source, but this was not my intention. I simply wanted to state in one sentence that
- matroska is opensource
- matroska is an alternative to other mentioned containers
By no means did i want to give the impression that matroska is the only free, open source container amongst them. If my wording implies exactly that, please tell me how to write that better, and i correct it.

About MP4 and MKV :

MKV is ment to replace AVI, and be a real x-platform alternative to MOV. Now, its important to understand that both AVI and MOV are not only containers, but they are the standard containers for multimedia frameworks, called Video for Windows ( AVI ) and Quicktime ( MOV ).

Whats the difference to MPEG / MP4 / RM ? Well, those are ment to be used as content distribution formats and for this reason designed to be 100% hardware compatible, means they are willingly restricted to only a hand full of video and audio compression formats, to make support for the files easier and to improve compatibility.

VfW and Quicktime, on the other hand, can be used to store more or less anything in them, as long as you can write a codec for it, using the standardized APIs of those frameworks ( VCM/ACM or QT API ). Now, if M$ would have designed VfW a bit more powerful in the beginning, so it would show all the crazy limitations it has ( no VBR audio support, no VFR video, etc. ), and if Quicktime was opensource so that people could have ported it to Linux or Windows, we certainly would have never started with our project.

But, as Windows user ( most from the team were when we started, today things look different ), we were fed up with the fact that we couldnt store Vorbis in AVI ( the ACM audio codec API was designed for PCM and similar stuff, 10 years back, MP3 CBR is probably the best it can do correctly

), and MOV was never an option for us because its closed and Quicktime sucks ( its even payware !!! ).

So we started the ambitious project to redefine AVI, and make a complete new, open source and x-platform multimedia platform for it. Soon we recognized that we had no clue about what we were trying to do, and the project almost had died. There was simply so much we had to define in a very early stage, and for many things it was impossible to predict how they would turn out in the end, it was frustrating and the task was too big.

By chance robux4 and Frank Klemm ( the musepack developer ) then had the idea of using a very flexible underlying framework for the files, similar to what XML does for text content, but in a binary version. Doing this, we knew we could always easily extend the format ( even easier than MP4/MOV can do with atoms ) without breaking compatibility with older files, even if this would cost us a little bit of overhead ( we're still much better than OGG or AVI

). This way we could start using the format with simple tools, so we had something working to show and to play with, and slowly new devs were interested in the possibilities and joined the team or contributed to it.

Today matroska has already crossed the 'critical mass' , we have support in FFMPEG now and every important, open video player out there supports it ( only Quicktime doesnt

). Even better, we found the perfect equivalent in the Gstreamer team, who were doing a multimedia framework, similar to Quicktime and VfW, for Linux, and opensource ( its a fixed part of GNOME/KDE ).

We are in the process of porting Gstreamer to Windows right now, and hope to be able to offer the first multimedia platform for Windows and Linux until end of this year, and with matroska as standard container.

I hope my explanation made things a bit clearer for you. MKV doesnt compete with MP4, both have completely different goals, and both have their right to exist. If you dont like it, simply dont use it, but please stop telling other people our project is of no use, at least until you havent understood the intentions behind it ...