476727 - Support the Matroska (MKV) container

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Audio/Video, defect)

Description

[Jeff Muizelaar [:jrmuizel]]

I'm not exactly sure how Matroska compares to Ogg but people seem to have fewer bad things to say about it (better seeking support and more codec agnostic) and it seems more popular for video content on the internet.

The Matroska website claims to have a bsd licensed playback library but I wasn't able to find it...

Comment 1

[cajbir (:cajbir)]

> it seems more popular for video content on the internet

I've never seen a Matroska container anywhere. Where do people use it?

Comment 2

[Jeff Muizelaar [:jrmuizel]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> > it seems more popular for video content on the internet
> 
> I've never seen a Matroska container anywhere. Where do people use it?

It's not the most legitimate place, but most of the movies at http://thepiratebay.org/top/207 use mkv and it's now a supported container in Divx Plus HD (http://investors.divx.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=357904 and
http://www.zatznotfunny.com/2008-06/divx-to-support-the-mkv-video-format/)

Comment 3

[cajbir (:cajbir)]

I suspect mkv is popular at thepiratebay since it's good for ripping dvd's. It can carry the menu's, chapters, alternate tracks, etc over.

Is there any Matroska content that uses Theora and Vorbis as the codecs though? Even if we support Matroska we couldn't play back any of those examples since they use Divx as the codec.

Comment 4

[Jeff Muizelaar [:jrmuizel]]

I don't know of any specific Theora/Vorbis content but the container does support those codecs. (http://matroska.org/technical/specs/codecid/index.html).

The value of this really depends on how much, if any, pain Ogg is giving us.

Comment 5

[cajbir (:cajbir)]

And how much pain a switch would be. We'd no longer be able to play back videos from archive.org, Wikimedia and other users of .ogg. Unless we supported both of course.

Comment 6

[Jeff Muizelaar [:jrmuizel]]

Yeah, I certainly don't think we should replace ogg support, the Matroska support would be an additional supported container.

Comment 7

[Chris Pearce [:cpearce (Not reading bugmail)]]

We don't have plans to do this at the moment, we may consider it at a later stage. We can reopen or recreate this bug if we decide to implement support for MKV later.