2006-07-14
Nach so vielen Downloads (insgesamt über 4 Millionen) unseres Packs für Windows haben wir uns entschieden, dieses nicht mehr zu aktualisieren und unsere Nutzer darum zu bitten, das CCCP-pack zu nutzen, welches besser ist und ständig aktualisiert wird. Unsere Pack-Seite verweist nun auf die CCCP-Seite.
2006-04-22
Die Erfolgsgeschichte von Matroska geht weiter, und das äußerst rasant! Über 3 Millionen Downloads unseres Matroska-Packs zeigen, daß die Nachfrage nach unserem Container ungebrochen weiter anhält, und er immer mehr Verwendung findet. Gerade die ständig wachsende Nutzung des neuen h.264 (AVC ; MPEG 4 Part 10) Videokompressionsformates, welches z.B. in den neuesten Nero Video Express - Versionen bereits integriert ist und unglaubliche Videoqualität bei sehr kleinen Dateigrößen erlaubt, hat für die Anwender einen Haken :
Der offizielle Container für h.264, genannt MP4 und technisch basierend auf dem Apple-eigenen MOV-Container, beinhaltet keine Unterstützung für das weit verbreitete AC3 Tonformat. Der Matroska-Container unterstützt nicht nur dieses wichtige Format in Kombination mit h.264, sondern erlaubt es auch, die Untertitelspuren von DVDs im sogenannten vobsub-Format (ein spezielles Bildkomprimierungverfahren, entwickelt speziell für die Untertitel auf DVDs) oder als Text-Untertitel bequem in einer einzigen Datei zu kombinieren. Auch die Unterstützung von Filmen bei denen sich die Framerate (Anzahl der Bilder pro Sekunde) ändert, z.B. bei japanischen Anime, haben wir in unseren Videotools weiter verbessert, und damit die Sympathie der Nutzer erworben. MKV entwickelt sich immer mehr zum Standard in der Anime-Fansub-Szene, und die Industrie weiß das.
Unser Menü-System wurde komplettiert, leider gibt es immer noch keinen Player, der es nun vollständig unterstützen würde. Am weitesten ist VLC 0.8.4 vom französischen Videolan-Team, der außer Buttons mittlerweile die meisten Matroska-Menü-Features verwenden kann. Enttäuschend war die Tatsache, daß die Entwickler von ratDVD, entgegen ihren Ankündigungen, den Quellcode ihres DirectShow-Menü-Filters niemals veröffentlicht haben. Das ist ein klarer Verstoß gegen die Regeln der GNU GPL, da ihr Filter zu weiten Teilen auf den libdvdnav libraries der Linux Welt basiert, welches GPL ist.
Was gibt es noch zu berichten :
- Unsere Freunde von Corecodec haben ihren schnellen h.264 AVC Dekodierfilter
CoreAVC mittlerweile vorgestellt,
leider können sie ihn nicht als Freeware anbieten, da sie dafür Lizenzen
an das MPEG Konsortium zahlen müssen. Der Filter erlaubt dramatische Einsparungen
bei der notwendigen CPU-Leistung für die Wiedergabe von h.264 komprimiertem
Videomaterial, ca. -20 - 30% im Vergleich zu FFMPEG/ffdshow.
Das Zugpferd im Stall von CoreCodec ist immer noch TCPMP,
The Core Pocket Mediaplayer, der derzeit kompletteste Mediaplayer für PocketPC,
WinCE, PalmOS und Symbian Plattformen ... natürlich mit perfektem MKV und
MKA support! Von diesem Player gibt es derzeit auch eine beta
Version für Windows-Betriebssysteme zum testen, wenn jemand gerne Filme
auf einem alten, schwachen PC ansehen will und die Rechenleistung dazu nicht
ausreicht. Einfach probieren!
- Die Leute von Zensonic sind immer noch wild entschlossen, in ihrem neusten Modell mit SIGMA EM85xx Chipsatz, dem Z500, Matroska-Unterstützung programmieren zu wollen. Das Gerät kann wohl von der Rechenleistung noch kein h.264 dekodieren, könnte aber dann MKV files mit MPEG 4 ASP (DivX, XviD) in Kombination mit AC3, AAC, Vorbis und MP3 Ton spielen. Ein Anfang, wenn es denn soweit kommen sollte. Wir halten euch gerne auf dem Laufenden. Bis Mitte des Jahres soll das Gerät wohl auch in Europa und Deutschland angeboten werden, derzeit gibt es aber leider noch keinen offiziellen Importeur dafür.
- Der bekannte Audioplayer Foobar2000
wurde in einer komplett neuen Version vorgestellt, er ging von 0.8.4 auf
nun 0.9. Wir sind sehr glücklich, daß ein freundlicher Japaner mit dem Nicknamen
'Ayana' sich des vorhandenen Matroska-Plugins für diesen Player angenommen
hat, und es für die neue Version angepasst hat. Das Plugin ist derzeit noch
nicht im offiziellen foobar-Installer enthalten, ihr findet es hier.
Wichtig: es funktioniert NUR mit dem neuen Foobar 0.9 !
Foobar2000 erfreut sich wachsender Beliebtheit auch bei Videokompressionsfreunden,
da es nicht nur ein Player, sondern auch ein sehr leistungsfähiger Konverter
von einem Tonformat in ein anderes ist, z.B. von AC3 nach AAC oder Vorbis.
- AVI-Mux GUI, der AVI und MKV muxer von unserem Freund Alexander 'alexnoe' Noé, ist in einer neuen Version verfügbar, nämlich 1.17.5. Dieser Muxer ist de facto die einzige interessante Alternative zu unserem offiziellen Matroska-Muxer von Moritz 'mosu' Bunkus, nämlich dem mkvtoolnix Paket. Gerade für das Erstellen von MKV files mit 'Editions' , einer Art Menü mit reduzierten Möglichkeiten, bietet AVI-Mux GUI sehr gute Unterstützung. Es ist z.B. sehr leicht möglich, die Kapitelnamen eines MKV files in unterschiedlichen Sprachen anzulegen, jede in einer eigenen Edition. Der Haali Mediasplitter wählt dann sogar bei der Wiedergabe des MKV automatisch die richtige Sprache für die Anzeige der Kapitel aus, basierend auf der Windows-Sprachversion (locale) des Wiedergabe-PCs.
- Wer MKV files gar nicht mag, oder sich seine Filme unbedingt auf einem
DVD Player ansehen will, hat nun 3 neue Möglichkeiten:
1. Wir haben eine Guide
mit Bildern online gestellt, die zeigt, wie man mit dem Tool DVD Santa (leider
nicht freeware) beinahe jede MKV-Datei recht einfach in eine DVD umwandeln
und brennen kann. Derzeit kann das Verfahren noch nicht für solche MKVs
angewandt werden, die eine Bildauflösung haben die über der von DVDs liegt
(z.B. HD-TV - Mitschnitte), und auch 5.1 Dolby Surround Tonspuren, z.B. im
HE-AAC Audioformat komprimiert, werden nicht unterstützt.
Generell sind wir ziemlich sauer, daß die DVD Santa Entwickler alle unsere
Angebote für eine Zusammenarbeit bisher komplett ignoriert haben, sie sind
sich wohl zu gut für uns. Eventuell könnt ihr, die Kunden, hier etwas bewirken
?
2. Ein ziemlich resoluter Anti-MKV Gegner (lest mal seinen bösen Kommentar
hier) hat ein Tool namens
AllToAvi
auf der Basis von Linux' mencoder entwickelt, das recht gut funktioniert
und die relativ einfache Umwandlung von MKV-Dateien in DivX-kompatible AVI-Dateien
erlaubt, natürlich mit einem gehörigen Rechen-/Zeitaufwand und den
zu erwartenden Qualitätsverlusten bzw. Größenzuwächsen. Untertitel werden
natürlich ins Bild eingebrannt (hardsubs), was aber den zahllosen DivX/DVD
Playern von Aldi und Co. sehr entgegenkommt.
3. Es gibt ein neues Profi-Tool, was dem vorgenannten ziemlich ähnelt,
aber wesentlich mehr Möglichkeiten bietet. Es heißt Mediacoder
und wird, ebenfalls auf der Basis von mencoder, von einem Japaner entwickelt.
Wie immer, wenn etwas lesitungsfähig ist, ist aber leider auch die Bedienung
noch recht kompliziert. Ich hoffe ich habe mal die Zeit, mich etwas besser
einzuarbeiten, und einen Guide für eine hochwertige DVD Konversion mit diesem
Encoder zu schreiben.
Das war's erst mal, ich hoffe daß es bis zum nächsten news Eintrag nicht wieder ein halbes Jahr dauern wird ;-) ...
2005-08-26
Da unser Matroska-Pack immer mehr Verbreitung findet, wird es Zeit, Schritte einzuleiten, die unseren Server entlasten. Das Fullpack wird etwa 4000 mal pro Tag heruntergeladen und installiert (Zahlen vom August, die aber auch auf vergangene Monate zutreffen). Das ergibt insgesamt etwa 14 GB an Downloads pro Tag. Daher bieten wir nun 2 Möglichkeiten an, die Packs via Peer-to-Peer herunterzuladen: BitTorrent und eMule... P2P ist natürlich nur effizient, wenn es genug Quellen gibt. Jeder, der mithelfen möchte, kann die Dateien auf seinem bevorzugten P2P-Client hosten.
Die entsprechenden Links sind hier zu finden: http://packs.matroska.org/
2005-06-06
Was gibt es Neues zu erzählen über das matroska Projekt, außer daß ich jetzt versuchen werde, diese Seite hier in Zukunft auch auf Deutsch zu pflegen? Unser Teamchef, robux4, ist im Moment sehr stark damit beschäftigt, unser neues Menüsystem in einen brauchbaren Zustand zu versetzen. Es wird sich sehr stark an das von konventionellen DVDs anlehnen, auch weil wir einsehen mußten, daß wir mit den begrenzten Möglichkeiten unseres kleinen Teams nicht in der Lage sein werden, einen guten Editor für Menüs selbst zu schreiben, und auf diese Weise vorhandene DVD-Menüs in matroska-Dateien verwendet werden können.
Das Erstellen solcher files von beliebigen Quell-DVDs klappt bereits hervorragend,
wir können diese komplett und mit allen Menüs und Funktionen in ein einziges
MKV file kopieren, und dabei für die einzelnen Video/Audio/Untertitel-Spuren
bereits JEDEN derzeit unterstützen Codec bzw. Format einsetzen. Dazu hat
robux4 das Tool DVDMenuXtractor geschaffen, welches bisher aber noch
nicht veröffentlicht ist, und die Fähigkeiten von mkvmerge wurden deutlich
erweitert.
Was nun noch fehlt ist die Möglichkeit, diese Files dann auch abzuspielen,
und all unsere Überlegungen, wie das auf M$ DirectShow, also mit dem Windows
Mediaplayer, erreicht werden könnte haben leider zu keinem brauchbaren Ergebnis
geführt. Auch aus diesem Grund sind wir gerade dabei, uns ein neues Tool
namens ratDVD sehr genau anzusehen,
welches mit dem Ziel entwickelt wurde, eine komplette DVD mit allen Menüs
in ein ZIP file zu packen, das mehrere MPEG Dateien in einer der DVD ähnelnden
Struktur enthält. Am meisten interessiert uns dabei der DirectShow-Navigationsfilter,
der mit dem Programm ausgeliefert wird, und angeblich genau die benötigten
Funktionalitäten über den Windows Mediaplayer 10 bereitstellt. Da dieser
Filter nach Angaben seines Authors auf einer Linux Bibliothek namens libdvdnav
basiert, der unter der GNU GPL opensource Lizenz geschützt ist, muß der
Author den Quellcode des Filters ebenfalls veröffentlichen, was wir sehr
begrüßen.
Bis das soweit ist arbeitet robux4 weiter mit Hochdruck an der Implementierung unseres Menüsystems in VLC, den exzellenten opensource Video-Player der französischen Videolan Gruppe. Dieser Player, der u.a. für Windows, MacOSX und Linux verfügbar ist, hat schon sehr lange matroska Unterstützung, jedoch war dieser nicht auf dem notwendigen Stand, um darauf aufbauend schnell auch Menüs unterstützen zu können. Wir hoffen aber, daß diese Arbeiten schon bald abgeschlossen sein werden, damit wir unser Menü System endgültig vorstellen können.
Was hat sich in den letzten Woche sonst noch ereignet? Nun, wir mußten unser bekanntes matroska playback pack für DirectShow Player leider schon sehr bald nach Vorstellung der Version 1.1.0 überarbeiten und Version 1.1.1 vorstellen, weil sich dummerweise ein Bug eingeschlichen hatte, der Inkompatibilitäten des neuen matroska splitter Filters von Mike 'Haali' Matsnev mit dem alten Splitter verursachen konnte. Ich bin im Übrigen neugierig, ob unsere Fans überhaupt bemerkt haben, daß dieser Splitter auch MP4 files abspielen kann, wenn man dies bei der Installation wünscht (normal deaktiviert), aber evtl. sollten wir das gar nicht zu sehr an die große Glocke hängen, um zu vermeiden, daß die Kosten für die Downloads ins Unermeßliche steigen. Das playback pack wurde mittlerweile mehr als 1 Million mal runtergeladen, und es scheint, als ob das große Interesse weiter anhalten würden, mit Blick auf die täglich gezogenen Kopien.
Die matroska Fans, die den Container mehr für Musik-CDs zusammen mit Foobar2000, der freien Audioplayer Alternative zu WinAMP, einsetzen (es soll ja wirklich welche geben), sollten sich mal das neue matroska plugin unseres Freundes Toff herunterladen und in den 'plugins' - Ordner des players kopieren. Es löst eine Reihe kleinerer Probleme, wie z.B. die Anzeige der einzelnen Songs der CD (die ja dann zu Kapiteln in einem einzigen file werden), wenn diese mit neueren mkvmerge Versionen erstellt worden sind. Zudem wurde das Springen in matroska audio files (MKA) mit Vorbis audio verbessert, und die tags sollten jetzt auch alle korrekt angezeigt werden. Meines Wissens nach ist dieses neue plugin derzeit noch in keinem der offiziellen fb2k installer enthalten, nicht mal der fb2k Entwickler Case ist mit seiner speziellen download Seite für die neuesten Versionen des Players hier auf dem neusten Stand.
Ich denke mal daß das jetzt erst mal reichen sollte, mehr News gibt dann (hoffentlich) schon bald !
15. Mai 2005
Auch wenn es im Moment nachc außen nicht so aussehen sollte, wir sind ziemlich aktiv. Die Arbeiten am Menüsystem kommen gut voran, und wir hoffen, in der nächsten VLC Version (0.8.2) bereits Wiedergabeunterstützung für dieses anbieten zu können.
In der Zwischenzeit haben wir eine neue Version unseres playback packs (v1.1.0) vorgestellt, welches mittlerweile schon über eine Million mal runtergeladen wurde. Die wesentlichste Änderung dürfte die Umstellung des matroska Splitter Filters von Gabest's auf Haali's splitter sein. Außerdem ist unser geliebtes FFdshow jetzt noch leistungsfähiger und unterstützt mehr codecs, so daß wir einige andere decoder Filter aus dem pack rausnehmen konnten. Hinzu kam ein Dekoder für Wavpack Audio files, ein neues Kompressionsverfahren, welches verlustfreie, normale oder sogenannte Hybrid (normal + Korrekturfile) von Musik erlaubt und dem wir eine große Zukunft vorhersagen.
6. Februar 2005
Neue Versionen von libebml (0.7.3) und libmatroska (0.7.5) wurden vorgestellt. Das Update wurde notwendig um die Basis für das kommende Menü System zu schaffen.
2. Januar 2005
Nein, wir sind NICHT tot :-) ! Das Projekt ist im Gegenteil gerade jetzt in einer sehr interessanten Phase, da wir schon sehr bald viele neue Möglichkeiten für den matroska Nutzer bereitstellen werden. Es ist zwar im Moment evtl. noch ein klein wenig zu früh darüber zu sprechen da einige erst halbfertig sind, aber hier ein kleiner Ausblick was schon bald möglich sein wird :
- MPEG 1/2 video Unterstützung : Die letzten Pre-Releases von mkvmerge (mkvtoolnix) erlauben ja nun schon seit einiger Zeit sogenannte MPEG Elementary Streams (ES) einzulesen, basierend auf John 'spyder' Cannon's MPEG parser Quelltext. Leider ist das bisher nicht gerade komfortabel zu nutzen, da die meisten MPEG files nun mal Program Streams (PS) sind und diese daher zunächst mal über tools wie z.B. TMPEGencoder oder bbdemux in ES umgewandelt werden müssen, bevor man sie mit mkvmerge in MKV muxen kann. Gerade daran hat Mosu nun sehr hart gearbeitet, erwartet für die nächste mkvtoolnix Version Unterstützung für MPEG PS und sogar VOB files.
- Menü's: Wir könne nun dank der harten Arbeit von Teamchef Steve 'robux4' Lhomme's an seinem neuen Programm DVDmenuXtractor komplette Menüstrukturen von DVD extrahieren. Es macht daraus ein XML file, welches dann von mkvmerge in den neusten Versionen verarbeitet werden kann. Das erlaubt es uns, eine kompleete DVD in ein einziges MKV file zu muxen, einschliesslich Video, Audio, Untertitel und Menü ! Das einzige Problem dabei ist, daß wir dafür noch keinen player haben, ein release kommt daher noch nicht in Frage. Wir diskutieren dafür mehrere Möglichkeiten, z.B. könnten wir das matroska CDL von TCMP (The Core Mediaplayer) umschreiben, den grossartigen Videolan player VLC anpassen oder ein spezielles DVD Navigationsfilter für alle DirectShow player machen. Die letzte Option wäre eindeutig die beste, weil damit alle ( oder die meisten ) DirectShow player das matroska Menü System unterstützen könnten.
- Wavpack 4: oh nein, nicht noch ein lossless ( verlustfreier
) audio codec, werdet ihr sagen. Das wäre aber ein wenig ungerecht, weil
sein Author, David Bryant, diesem codec eine Reihe von features mitgegeben
hat, die FLAC oder TTA
nicht bieten können :
- einen normalen ( verlustbehafteten ) Modus : zusätzlich zum lossless Modus bietet Wavpack einen Kompressionsverfahren an, das zwar im Vergleich zu MP3 und Konsorten eine etwas höhere Bitrate verlangt, dafür aber auch für Expertenohren ausgezeichnet klingt. Ohne die Sache komplizieren zu wollen, verwendet Wavpack in diesem Modus kein sogenanntes Psycho-Modell, d.h es werden nicht Teile der Musik ganz einfach unter den Tisch geworfen ( der codec 'entscheidet' dabei ob der Mensch das hören kann oder nicht ), wie das bei MP3 der Fall ist. Die Bitrate ist dadurch mit ca. 300 kbps zwar hoch, der Klang aber erstklassig.
- ein neuer 'Hybrid' Modus : Derart betrieben wird Wavpack4 gleich zwei files aus eurer Musik machen, nämlich ein verlustbehaftetes mit hoher bitrate ( s.o. ) und ein sogenanntes Korrekturfile. Der codec kann dann das Originalfile ohne jeglichen Verlust aus den beiden Teilen wiederherstellen. Die Idee ist, das verlustbehaftete file auf ein portables Gerät mit beschränkter Speicherkapazität ( z.B. PocketPC ) laden zu können, während das zugehörigeKorrekturfile zu Hause auf der Festplatte des Hauptrechners verbleibt. Zu Hause kann man dann 'lossless', also Originalqualität hören, und für den Portable spart man Speicherplatz ohne alles immer doppelt speichern zu müssen. Mit matroska können wir, der Einfachheit halber, beide Teile in einem MKA file speichern, und das verlustbehaftete dann über einen schnellen Extraktionsprozess entnehmen um das Speichermdium des Portable mit neuer Musik zu laden.
Steve hat mkvmerge bereits mit perfektem Wavpack4 support ausgestattett, dies wird wohl ebenfalls mit der nächsten Version 1.2.0 veröffentlicht werden.
2004-10-08
There is a PERL parser for matroska files now, made by a user called Omion on Hydrogenaudio.org. I don't expect that many people will download this in its current phase (alpha), but you can find it on his website or in our SVN server. You can find some background about the parser on Hydrogenaudio in this thread.
Another very interesting tool was released from our old and dear friend Christophe 'Toff' Paris, shortly before he went to another town to start his new job here. This very useful tool is called MatroskaDiag and will analyze matroska files and then check your PC if you have all the right filters installed to play it with a DirectShow based player like Windows Mediaplayer, or more preferably Zoomplayer or TCMP. For interested developers, here are the sources in Delphi. Toff, from the whole matroska team, all the best for your new job and your new life. We hope you will always be our friend, as we are very proud to be yours.
Other news :
- AvInfo and Gspot have support for MKV files now. Both are video info tools, similar to VideoInspector and MediaInfo. I couldn't test the two new tools still, but knowing the authors and the quality of their tools when i was using them for AVI files, i expect they did a good job.
- Mosu has released the very latest version of Mkvtoolnix, 0.9.6 . More about it here.
2004-09-26
It has been a while since i had the time to write a long news entry, but let me just start now and see how much i can report about the last months since we had been celebrating our 1st birthday in May. A lot has happened since then, matroska is on a very good way to become a well respected and supported format. But here the news one by one :
- The most amazing thing to happen was probably that we can now play MKV files on PocketPC's with Betaplayer. This great player is also a Corecodec project, like PocketMVP. Picard, its main developer, was using Haali's integer C library to implement matroska support in it, and there is more to come.
- Talking about Haali's library, he released the alpha version of his DirectShow splitter filter already, you can get it here. Most of the bugs should be resolved already, and this new splitter will be the basis for all future developments we are working on now ... but of course, i cant tell you about this now ;) ...
- Kyle Katarn has released a new version of his VideoInspector tool, that will tell you everything about your matroska, AVI, MPEG and MOV files
- Spyder was recently improving on his alpha tool to mux MPEG 1/2 video into MKV files. It can be obtained from here, and there is a thread about it on Doom9.
- We are working on a complete rewrite of the tagging system, find the docs proposals here. At the same time we are working hard on implementing our menue system, the proposal is here.
- Goldenear was putting a lot of work into a tool to create matroska files containing a complete CD, with chapters marking every song. There are several options for the compression format to be used, but default is FLAC. The tool is called MKAencoder and can be obtained from here. Its a script for EAC, the great Audio CD ripping tool. He also updated the matroska plugin for Foobar2000, called foo_matroska, to be loaded from here. A Guide on how to use it was posted on Hydrogenaudio.org
Thats it for the time being, more news soon :) .....
2004-08-21
A new version of the Matroska Pack (v1.0.3) was released today. This version supports new Matroska fonctionalities, the TTA lossless codec and all other DirectShow filters have been updated.
Mkvtoolnix (v0.9.5) was also released with the same new functionalities and many bugs fixed. It depends on a new version of libmatroska (v0.7.3) that is up to date with all the latest additions to the specs.
2004-08-08
We have distributed the 200,000th Matroska Pack v1.0.2 this week-end.
2004-05-01
Its matroska's 1st birthday today !!! Exactly one year
ago, we were publishing the first public tools to create and playback matroska
files, at that time only for the Windows platform, of course after more
than one year of preparation and specs definition already.
As of today, our matroska playback packs are downloaded more than 40,000
times each month, the format can be used and played back
on Linux, Windows, MacOSX and BeOS, and this is certainly not the end .....
in fact we have big plans with matroska and gstreamer, so that we can make
a real, free and opensource multimedia platform, similar to Quicktime and
Video for Windows ( VfW ) or DirectShow.
A big, big thank you goes out to the team and all our supporters and users,
as well as to all the developers who have been working actively on implementing
matroska support in their tools, thus supporting our contraints to establish
it as a free, modern and open alternative to good old AVI, and MOV. We hpe
that there may be many many more birthdays for our 'baby' and that it will
grow and become what its parents had in mind when designing it : a beautiful
and intelligent opensource and open standard multimedia project. Here some
more News about it :
- the main libraries for matroska writing and reading, libmatroska and libebml, are now released under the L-GPL license rather than the GPL/QPL dual licensing system we have been using so far. This means that we are prepared to open up the format for developers wanting to implement matroska support into commercial applications by offering them a more liberal license, as we feel quite safe to do that after one full year of usage and testing.
- matroska is on its way to go Stable Version 1.0 soon, we just havent finally decided if we will wait for the actual implementation of the matroska menue system until 1.0, or if we will add that later, once we will move towards 2.0.
- Peter Pawlowski has extended his support for various audio compression formats packed in the matroska container in his great audio player Foobar2000, and added support for the very latest matroska tagging system. He also added more decoders to work in combination with containers like matroska and MP4, instead of their 'native' framing.
- Frank Klemm, the developer of MPC, has started to work on a version of it that can be muxed into matroska, called SV 7.5, allowing the use of MPC for movies. After that, we hopefully we will even see him working on a SV8 version, with support for multi-channel ( 5.1 Dolby Surround ) and DRC ( dynamic range control ).
- DVD, the author of DVDtoMKV, the great all-in-one DVD compression program, has finished his exams ( successfully, we have no doubts here, do we ) and promised to continue working on it soon. The first alpha was very well accepted by the users, and we are eagerly awaiting the next versions now. If you are interested to test the existing version, you will find it here.
- A guy called DarkDudae made a nice Windows GUI for mkvextract, in case you really plan to extract the video and audio from your matroska files, to convert them into DVDs or any other video format. Read more about it on Doom9.
- The new matroska playback packs for Windows, version 1.0.2, were released to the public on April 1st. We fixed a couple of minor bugs in some of the programs distributed in them, and also changed the standard behaviour for the installation of some of them, especially Morgan Stream Switcher, as it was causing problems on the machines of some users, especially those with overloaded 'codec packs' installed. You can download them here.
- As mentioned above already, we are currently in the process of porting Gstreamer to Windows, investigating if we can use it to convert matroska+gstreamer into a real, free and opensource multimedia alternative to Quicktime ( with MOV ) and VfW ( with AVI ). We also have plans for a free movie editor based on this platform, and the possibility to export into MP4, AVI, MPEG and of course matroska from it.
- There is still no stable release of Xine with matroska support, but it was reported to me that the CVS version is working quite nicely already. If you're on Linux, its a must for you to test it :-) ! If you dont like to be 'guinea-pig' for CVS, the latest pre-release ( RC4 ) is for you, it even has seeking support already. Of course, VLC and mplayer will work fine also, only the current Gstreamer plugin for matroska seems to have some problems still, being looked at.
- The programmer of Zoomplayer,
our friend and long time supporter |Blight| has improved
matroska support in his latest version of his great Mediaplayer. It can
now read Aspect Ratio ( AR ) information from the matroska track header,
independant form the decoder filter that was used, and it will also read
the track name and display it. If he goes on improving his matroska support
at this speed, our two favourite players MPC
and TCMP really will
have to watch out to not get left behind ;-) .... but we heard TCMP5 is
in the works already ....
Ok, thats it for today ... more news in a couple of weeks, you all know i have been quite lazy about that recently, and i dont think this will change soon ;-) ..... and dont forget to have a toast on matroska's 1st b-day later during the day !
2004-01-20
Some more great news for the new year !!
- foobar 2000, the great audio player and winamp alternative has native Matroska support now for .MKA files, thanks to a plugin from Jory 'Jcsston' Stone. Get the 'special installer' from here and activate matroska support in the installer setup.
- We have MPEG2 and MPEG1 video in MKV working !! More about this soon ...
2003-12-03
This is the first news entry i am writing since august, what a
shame !! Some people even contacted us if matroska is dead because
of that, which of course is ridiculous, as matroska has moved forward a
lot during the last 3 months. It were mainly private reasons that didnt
allow me to update this page as often as i should have, please accept my
apologies for that !
Now, to give you a brief overview of what has happened since august, read
here :
- We have added a new lacing system to libmatroska, reducing overhead
for some audio formats significantly, by introducing a so-called 'EBML
lacing' in addition to the old, well-known 'Xiph lacing',
inspired by Ogg Vorbis. The main library will now by default mux any audio
track in 'auto' mode, choosing the best lacing mode automatically for
every audio track, and thus ensuring minimum overhead. Its not astonishing
that a Vorbis track muxed into a .MKA file, in 9 of 10 cases, will now
result in a smaller file than the original Ogg ;-) ....
As a result of that, all existing demuxers and parser filters had to be compiled against latest libmatroska, otherwise they couldnt play the new files. Older files stay 100% spec compliant, as the new lacing is only an extension to the specs, not a change. - mkvmerge from Mosu's great mkvtoolnix set of matroska muxing/editing tools, is now capable of muxing DVD Style Subtitles, generally known a VOBSUBs, into the matroska container, and meanwhile most players do support playback of them fine. It was very surprising to see, that the DVD subtitles are not so big at all, especially when demuxed from their MPEG transport layer. Especially our Asian fans are quite happy about this feature, as it will allow them to save the OCR process, which reportedly isnt very big fun for Asian languages ;-) ! Of course, the size of a vobsub track is still a couple of MB ( typically 2 - 5 MB ) per language, so it will use a lot more space than a SRT or SSA track. To reduce this a little bit, we also added compression via zlib to the SPU packets in the subtitles, saving another 25 - 35% of the subtitles track size. Playback on Windows via DirectShow, again, is ensured thanks to Gabest's wonderful DVobSub subtitle filter ( vsfilter.dll )
- both mkvmerge and VirtualdubMod have had the ability to write track names into matroska files since some time now, to allow custom descriptions of any audio or subtitles file, like 'english - Director's comment' . Unfortunately there was no way to read and display them in the players supporting matroska yet. This has changed now, because Toff from the corecodec Team modified the matroskasplitter.ax parser filter by adding a new powerful interface, and on top of DirectShow. Now it is possible to read those 'track names' on DirectShow, and meanwhile there are already 4 players supporting it, namely 'The Core Media Player RC5' , 'Zoomplayer' , 'BSplayer' and 'KoolPlaya' . Zoomplayer can now even support automatic aspect ratio compensation via this interface, and completely independant from ffdshow and its resizing capabilities. The Videolan team is implementing support for track names into VLC right now, so even on Linux this should be available soon.
- AAC and SBR AAC tracks can now be muxed from MP4 files also, again in mkvmerge. That way the SBR ( Spectral Band Replication ) nature of the AAC track is also automatically detected, other than when its muxed from the AAC container.
- we put up a new Samples Page, where we are offering state-of-the art sample files, so that new users can download them and get an impression what can be done with the powerful matroska container. The very latest of them is the Matrix Reloaded Trailer, and these will be available in 2 version, with XviD 1.0 Beta and RealVideo9, and both contain track names, chapters, and even attachements.
- while matroska can support Variable Frame Rate ( VFR ) by nature, there are currently no video encoders available that would support this feature by default. We found a little workaround, as latest mkvmerge will allow to use an external Timestamp File to create those files, even if they were compressed on CFR tools. For more information, read the New A/V container section on Doom9.org .
- we always received a lot of criticism, especially from the Linux world, why our main library is written in C++, instead of just C ! Our developers are still backing up this decision, as they are convinced that the object orientated C++ language will be better for a container format. However, we were aiming since some time to get support for matroska in the great FFMPEG open source video library, but to no avail, as their main developers were postulating a C library for integration of matroska into their libavformat collection of container demuxers. It was again our friend Ronald 'BBB' Bultje from the Gstreamer development team, who was closing the gap, by completely rewriting the matroska libraries libmatroska and libebml in plain C ! His library is already in the Gstreamer CVS, and was used for his matroska gst-plugin. We hope to be able to make a patch for libavformat soon, to get even better support for matroska than is existing already.
- Last but not Least : There has been a lot of rumour about that, but
yes, its true : We are in contact with at least one company making hardware
DVD/MPEG4 players, about implementing matroska support into their
units :-) !! We cant tell you right now who they are, but this is not
a fake, and it may happen sooner than you all can believe ;-) .....
2003-08-04
- The big 'CHIP/Liisachan' release is out, bringing us
- chapters
- matroska tags
- attachement files
- CRC32 EDC elements
- file splitting with indexing
- RV9 video in MKV ( Realmedia )
- RA audio in MKV ( RealAudio )
- SSA/ASS subtitles muxing into MKV files
more details here. Also, we have been starting a nice test, the 'Anamorphic encoding test' ... not easy to undertake, but shouldn't really be a problem
for you Pro's ......
2003-07-31
- We were pretty lucky when i decided to send this email, my guess. Only by chance i was informed that VLC, the great opensource player and streaming server project from France ( now with native matroska support ), would be included in one of the upcoming issues of CHIP, one of the biggest ( if not THE biggest ) PC magazines in Germany. I just contacted the member of the CHIP team about including matroska tools in the same issue, and he promised to look at it. After a short while we were informed that a short article about matroska is already on its way, and they would be pleased to include our tools in the September issue of the magazine. However, they need the working software for testing until 4th august, and this was a fine opportunity to set a release date for the complete development team, and we wanted to have chapter support by then in best case. Now this seems to be working out great, most of our software is ready and already half way tested, and it seems that CHIP will really invest some time into presenting our tools in a very positive way. Chapter support was the last remaining feature where OGM, a kind of 'competing' opensource container format to matroska, had a small advantage, so we are quite eager now to release what we have done now, and we will do so on 4th august officially, same date when we have to give the software to the CHIP guys for getting it onto the CD coming with the September issue. Stay tuned and watch our features list turning green, there is even more to come ;-).
2003-07-28
- We are back !!! Our team was going through a hard time
during the last 4 weeks, but hopefully we have normality back now. What
has happened ? Well, the central server of Corecodec.org, the opensource
community we chose to be hosted on and where our CVS is on, was hacked
from somebody who obviously wanted to hurt the project. You may ask why
i can be so sure about this, well there are attacks and attacks, and this
attack was simply ment to destroy the server, or in best case make sure
that corecodec.org as a service will be down for a certain time, it was
no attack to get control of the server to be able to make illegal things
from it, or to make other fancy bullshiting from it.
Everybody who was ever participating in an opensource project as an active developer can imagine how bad it was to have lost CVS, but to make sure this may never happen again we have installed some hidden CVS servers now, so in case corecodec.org gets hacked again ( and this is what we seriously expect to happen ) we can quickly switch to these private machines, and development of the container can go on by all means. Whoever is trying to prevent matroska from becoming widely adopted and used, and for whatever reason this is done, we will make sure he will fail. Every server can get hacked if somebody is just trying hard enough, no doubt. There is no need to prove to the world that corecodec.org can be hacked, we are not even claiming that its a pretty secured server, so the only conclusion we can make out of the repeated attacks ( this was not the first time, believe me ) is that matroska and corecodec are unwanted by certain people in the video and audio encoding world. You call me paranoid ? All servers get hacked occasionally ? Well yes, maybe i am really starting to become paranoid, but i can smell stuff if there is some, belive me.
However, to show that all these attempts can not stop something thats REALLY good, please allow me to list the events of the last 4 weeks : - Thanks to our core dev team member Jory 'jcsston' Stone, who made it
all rolling with a Real reader and a separate matroska writer plugin (
to be released soon ), we can now mux RealVideo 9 into matroska files,
as well as most RealAudio codecs, and there are even three different ways
to do it. Muxing Real video/audio into matroska is one thing, but playback
on Windows, especially via DirectShow was a completely different story.
It was again Gabest, the author of the best matroska DirectShow parser
filter and the DirectShow muxer filter, who solved the problem by creating
a wrapper filter for the Real DLLs, which can be found on every Windows
PC once the RealOne player was installed. As all his other recent stuff,
these wrapper filters can be found on his Guliverkli
page. In the package there is also a Realmedia splitter filter, so
that now all Real files can be played on every normal DirectShow based
Mediaplayer, but this filter can also be used to mux Real content into
the matroska container, if a suitable DirectShow graph is built in Graphedit,
with Realsplitter opening the Realmedia files and matroska muxer filter
connected to it. To make things easier for normal users who are not capable
of building DirectShow graphs in Graphedit, there is a tool existing from
'Dark-Cracker', a well known developer and forum member of Doom9, who
made an easy to handle GUI
for that.
Of course, muxing RealMedia into matroska will also work fine on Linux, Mosu implemented this into the well known MKVtoolnix compilation, and the latest version with Realmedia handling should be released soon. His last mplayer patch ( it is now in official mplayer CVS already ) can also play it fine, so the support for RV9 and RA in matroska is almost perfect on Linux already, and should soon be possible on BeOS and MaxOSX also, using the very same tools. - A big release can be expected from us soon, and this time we have set a date until we will make this release, and for a very good reason. By chance we got in contact with CHIP, one of the biggest ( if not THE biggest ) PC magazines in good old Germany. The CHIP guys promised to look at our tools for matroska file creation, and to include them into the SEPTEMBER issue of the magazine, if found good and working correctly. We dont have any doubts that our stuff is working, and with some luck we may even be able to add chapter support to most of the tools, mainly VirtualdubMod, both of the DirectShow parser filters and mplayer. To learn more about the planned features of matroska, and when we think we will be able to add them, can be found here.
- Another important thing was being prepared in the last 4 weeks, and
we expect it to be one of the most important milestones for the complete
project. Most of the matroska files that are currently created by the
various existing tools, are so-called 'VFW/AVI compatibility' files, simply
because of the reason because they are made from either AVIs or OGM files,
or created with tools that are VFW based, like VirtualdubMod. In this
mode the matroska container is more or less clueless about the content
it has, as all the tools do is to set the matroska codec IDs to V_MS/VFW/FOURCC
for video and A_MS/ACM for audio, and all the important codec data are
simply copied from the corresponding VFW structures ( BITMAPINFOHEADER,
VIDEOINFOHEADER and WAVEFORMATEX ) in the KaxCodecPrivateDate filed in
the matroska track header. This mode was always planned and is also very
necessary to be able to support EVERY existing AVI file, whatever codecs
it may use, but we were also always convinced that we should try to enforce
that matroska files are used in their very own 'native' modes, also to
express the cross-platform idea behind the project.
Thanks to the work of David 'DaveEL' Leatherdale, author of the well known tool avs2avi and moderator on Doom9, we are a very big step closer to this goal. Dave, after adding MKV output to avs2avi, made a new tool called avs2matroska, and this tool is NOT using VCM codecs for file creation, but can use existing DLLs from certina codecs for file creation, and those files will be native files ! For a first test avs2matroska is statically linked to the opensource, education MPEG4 encoder project XviD, and first alpha versions are now being tested thoroughly by a limited team of alpha testers, but the created files work fine already. We hope to be able to release avs2matroska out into the wild on 4th august also, but certainly only to a limited audience of users who will be capable to compile their own binaries from the XviD sources, and only for test purposes. These native files should play perfectly in mplayer and VLC by then, and also on Windows DirectShow with ANY installed MPEG4 capable DirectShow decoder filter, such as DivX5, 3ivX, NeroDigital and of course the great ffdshow decoder filter, thanks to a small translator filter ( also made by DaveEL ) called 'timestamp manager'.
I hope this is enough news for today, now that we have our CVS back we promise to keep you up-to-date about the development of the project more frequently :) !
2003-06-23
- The latest matroska download pack for Windows users is now available from our downloads page. It was made by Brendan 'The Edge' from Ireland and does detect automatically what version of Windows is used, installing the correct DirectShow parser filter and subtitles filter ( Gabest' DVobSub ).
2003-06-22
- Yes, its true !!! The Videolan guys have added experimental matroska
support to the latest version of their nifty player, VLC 0.6.0. More on
Videolan !
To make it even better, Sam, one of the leading developers of Videolan suggested to include libmatroska into the official Debian release, which would make the matroska container format a widely supported thing at least in the Linux world. This would fit very well into the picture that at the last GUADEC meeting in Ireland the GNOME people from the Gstreamer team discussed the possibility to make matroska the default output format from gst-rec, the main capturing application from Gstreamer. Big thanks to Ronald 'BBB' Bultje here, who has been the main speaker for matroska in this respect. - Mosu has released mkvtoolnix 0.5.0 on his site . Major changes include the adding of SSA/ASS muxing, changing the win32 compile from cygwin to mingw, and the fact that in this release reference priority elements are supported now ( important for native MKV video streams with b-frames ).
- The fansubber team from Anime-Xtreme.com have released their first anime movie using the matroska container. To get it you will need bittorrent. This is the first real movie release using matroska as container i am aware of, and this will definitely be the last kind of announcement for these from my side from now on, this is just to let you know that our hard work found its friends finally ;-) ... i am convinced this will NOT be the last release in .mkv container format ...
- DaveEL is making it true. Expect a release of avs2matroska in not so far future, with xvid.dll dynamically linked and writing native matroska MPEG4 files.
2003-06-19
- Gabest has made it possible : his last version of the DVobSub
DirectShow filter ( 2.26 ) has a source filter coming with it, so
that you can now mux SSA subtitles into matroska files with
his latest matroska
muxer DirectShow filter ! For playback of these files you need DVobSub
2.26 again, and his latest matroska
DirectShow splitter/parser filter. Please check the Gulliverkli download
pages for newer versions in any case before downloading. As a sidenote,
his muxer filter will also allow transmuxing of Microsoft WMV9 video files
( ASF/WMV container ) fine into matroska files, from Graphedit, and with
WMV9 VCM installed on your PC you can even open and edit
the files in latest VirtualdubMod
:-) ....
Mosu has released a new version of his mkvtoolnix for Linux also, tagged 0.4.4 as the latest libraries are. This new version includes file splitting capabilities, and he has changed the CLI commands almost completely. There are 2 different win32 binaries now, first Mosu's cygwin compile and then a new VC6++ compile made by Nic, which doesnt require cygwin.
2003-06-15
- libebml
+ libmatroska
(v0.4.4), these packages contain the sources of the library to read/write
matroska files. You can also get the Unix/Linux version of libebml
+ libmatroska.
This version features better support for UTF-8 on all platforms, introduces some new elements and a much better structure for all tag elements.
The library is written in standard C++ and can be compiled on many platforms. It has been tested under MSVC6, Linux GCC 3.2, Linux GCC 2.95, GCC 3.1-Darwin (Max OSX). It is licensed under a dual QPL-GPL license.
2003-06-09
- Matroska DirectShow Filter (v0.4.3), again a new DirectShow parser. It is adding support for Vorbis playback via Corevorbis, as the other Vorbis decoder filter from Tobias Waldvogel, known as OggDS, has problems understanding the timestamp codes from matroska files correctly. It uses the latest library, same as the new VirtualdubMod. For users of Windows 9x/ME there is again a special compile to be used without unicode support.
2003-05-24
- Matroska
DirectShow Filter (v0.4.2), this file will allow you to play matroska
files in any good DirectShow host.
There is also an untested version usable for Windows 98 users with restricted Unicode support.
Most jerkiness problems seem to be fixed, much less memory leaks, AAC is now supported.
2003-05-21
- libebml
+ libmatroska
(v0.4.3), these packages contain the sources of the library to read/write
matroska files. You can also get the Unix/Linux version of libebml
+ libmatroska.
This version enforce stricter checking of mandatory elements when writing and a better way to write Segments
The library is written in standard C++ and can be compiled on many platforms. It has been tested under MSVC6, Linux GCC 3.2, Linux GCC 2.95, GCC 3.1-Darwin (Max OSX). It is licensed under a dual QPL-GPL license.
2003-05-19
- Matroska
DirectShow Filter (v0.4.1), this file will allow you to play matroska
files in any good DirectShow host.
There is also an untested version usable for Windows 98 users with restricted Unicode support.
A crash when doing multiple seek has been solved, jerkiness should happen less often, seeking to a keyframe is supported when a Cue Entry is present in the file.
2003-05-11 : Iris release
- Matroska
DirectShow Filter (v0.4.0), this file will allow you to play matroska
files in any good DirectShow host.
There is also a version usable for Windows 98 users with restricted Unicode support.
It has been rewritten from scratch and is now stable and support Play/Pause/Stop/Seek/Quit.
Note : It will seek to Cluster boundaries, that means you may experience weird display if you seek on a non keyframe. - TCMP CDL plugin (v1.0), a plugin to read more data in matroska files when you use The Core Media Player.
- libebml
+ libmatroska
(v0.4.2), these packages contain the sources of the library to read/write
matroska files.
There is also a version for UNIX editors of libebml and libmatroska.
The library is written in standard C++ and can be compiled on many platforms. It has been tested under MSVC6, Linux GCC 3.2, Linux GCC 2.95, GCC 3.1-Darwin (Max OSX). It is licensed under a dual QPL-GPL license.
2003-05-01
- Matroska
DirectShow Filter (v0.3.0), this file will allow you to play matroska
files in any good DirectShow host.
There are some limitations in the filter : seeking is not possible (we'll fix that ASAP), you can't retrieve information being played. - VirtualDubMod
(v1.5.1.1a), this is the first official build of the popular Windows video
editing tool.
It already supports all the basic features to mux data into matroska. - The
Core Media Player (Matroska Edition), this is a new version of the
popular windows player with support for reading matroska files (.mkv and
.mka).
It includes the matroska DirectShow in the package. - mpa2mka (Win32 build), a command line tool to remux any MPEG Audio file in a matroska audio file (.mka).
- wav2mka (Win32 build), a command line tool to remux a RIFF/WAV file with any codec into a matroska audio file (.mka).
- MKVtoolnix,
Moritz Bunkus has created these command line tools under Unix to create
audio and video matroska files.
The result is really great and as powerful as VirtualDubMod if not more. - MPlayer,
Moritz Bunkus has also created a patch to the developement build of this
popular UNIX video player to play audio and video matroska files.
So far it is the only player to support seeking in matroska ! Get instructions on how to build it for your machine on his site (requires CVS). - libebml
+ libmatroska
(v0.4.1), these packages contain the sources of the library to read/write
matroska files.
There is also a version for UNIX editors of libebml and libmatroska.
The library is written in standard C++ and can be compiled on many platforms. It has been tested under MSVC6, Linux GCC 3.2, Linux GCC 2.95, GCC 3.1-Darwin (Max OSX). It is licensed under a dual QPL-GPL license.
2002-12-06
The matroska project was created on SourceForge, based on previous work done on MCF container. It's the official birth date of matroska.
