Post
by Tab. » Tue Aug 05, 2003 8:58 pm
:P
shit's a generic replacement for stuff when you want to sound badass like I try to do all the time :o
Anyway, if you want massive out of box support, you're going to have to use old, established things. Old = outdated. In the digital video world pretty much the older you get the more support you get. AVI is old, very old. VFW is old. They're rusty. They suck. But any PC with windows installed can parse them. That's the power of a company that creates/sells operating systems en masse. Mpeg program streams are old. Not as old and rusty, with real b-frame support and vbr audio. But most if not all PC's have some sort of out of box directshow mpeg parser. That's the power of an established standard. Hopefully some day Mpeg 4 will reach that.
With codecs, it's the same thing. Windows comes with an indeo 4 decoder (used to come with 5 fuckin ligos). It comes with cinepak. If you want support, use these in an avi. Your videos will be huge and shit quality, but they'll have support. Again M$ controls your user base.
Or use the mpeg 1 codec. Along with the parsers come decoders. The power of a dominant standard.
Trace up to 1999 and you get msmpeg4 and divx. As you go up the timeline, you get codecs and formats which need more power to decode. DivX is still very conservative in this area. Most people have a divx 3 decoder, and if I'm not mistaken anyone could play back divx 3 anyway so long as they have the (locked) msmpeg4v3 codec on their system, which if they have any newer windows, they will.
Thanks to SBC, this is a great medium between support and quality. Unfortunately, divx is a suck ass hacked format and it's not exactly what I would want to base my stuff on as far as a standard goes. This is the power of M$ again, as well as a massive amount of rippers using the format.
Then you have stuff like RealMedia. RM is a self contained standard inside it's own company. Fortunately for RM, RealNetworks has managed to spread it's seed to a LOT of users. Due to the nature of the closed format, they can also manage codec downloads automatically when newer technologies within the format develop. This makes for a powerful standard itself, due to the nature of it's containment. Because of that, the latest codecs can be used without much difficulty for the user base. This is a great tradeoff between new and supported. Unfortunately, it's only good in theory, as RN has a bad history that degrades the power of an otherwise powerful concept.
Bump up on the timeline yet again and you get things like projectmayo, xvid, and divx 4-5x. While the mpeg-4 standard itself should provide solutions for this, it's immature and cannot fulfill it's purpose so far as playback and format goes with these early projects. As a result you get stuff like ISO mpeg 4 video streams being stored in avi format, the need for new decoders and vfw codecs. It's mainly the lateness of the mpeg 4 standard in comparison with the developmental codecs that's caused this mass confusion with formats and problems with inoperability. Then again, we can trace that to microsoft's genius idea to distribute msmpeg4 as an incomplete vfw codec.
The only power here is that of the distributors, and companies like DXN which are half acting on the mpeg4 standard by at least supplying ISO decoders. Most all what was said here for premature mpeg 4 codecs also applies to opensource formats like ogg and matroska.
Around this time you get shit like WMV popping up. Microsoft again as a company which most likely distros your OS, has the power to decide what formats are supported out of the box. This means WMV will have no problem gaining tons of support. A similarly good trade off as provided by RM, but also plagued with a bad reputation. Don't forget that microsoft is evil.
Finally, you have Mpeg 4 as a standard. In itself lies the ability to become as powerful as it's predecessor, but the standard is huge and has taken a long time to become adopted. Once it kicks in, ISO decoders and parsers will be available en masse as is with mpeg 1 today. Something like this can only gain support by companies which choose to include it in their products, and content providers such as ourselves who decide to use the format in their content.
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what the fuck did I just write
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installing MKV is no different from installing DivX (except mkv won't install GAIN for the full package :/ ). By your logic you may as well encode your shit in RM, since 90% of computers have RealOne installed. The attachment and subtitle abilities of MKV makes for some promising abilites as far as AMV's go, and it would be a quick and easy method for spreading the usage of the format.
