[mythtv] Musings On Standard File Formats

James Knight foom at fuhm.net
Mon Apr 21 01:47:22 EDT 2003


On Friday, April 18, 2003, at 11:18  PM, Matt Zimmerman wrote:

> The AVI file format is pretty much crap.  If you can't point to an
> alternative which can provide everything that the current format does 
> (or
> most of it, and extensibility), then that should give a pretty good
> indication as to why MythTV does things this way.
>
> Maybe ogg will be viable one day as a video stream container, but it 
> isn't
> yet.

The MPEG-4 standard container format (aka Quicktime container) should 
do everything you want to do. I'm no expert on the NuppelVideo format, 
so I'm not sure exactly what features you need, but the QT container is 
*extremely* extensible, and seems to have a lot of built-in features 
already like text tracks for subtitles, etc. Since it's part of the 
MPEG-4 standard, support for it should not be a problem.

I'm unclear why noone who's advocating changing container formats has 
suggested that storing an MPEG-4 (of course other formats too) video in 
an MPEG-4 container is a good idea, so I thought I'd just throw it out 
there as a sensible solution. ;)

I don't see much advantage in changing containers at this point in time 
(seems like a lot of work for not too much gain), but if a change 
*were* to happen, I think it'd make the most sense to switch to the 
standard MPEG-4 container rather than some half-baked container like 
OGG or something really crappy like AVI.

James



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