[MPlayer-dev-eng] MPCF Draft/Discussion (MPlayer ContainerFormat)

[Michael Niedermayer]

Hi

On Friday 07 February 2003 12:42, michael c wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I must say, I think I agree with Fabien that the file format should not
> close the door on advanced features. The only thing that should be kept in
> mind is that those features should not make everything over-complicated.
>
> I propose that there could be another stream type (named "generic" or
> something), in which additional features could then be implemented. Then,
additional stream types will be added if we need them, but generic is 
certainly a bad name, i think its very stupid to add stuff just because it 
could be usefull sometime in the future for someone, that would result in a 
bloated standard like mpeg-4 where >90% of the features will never be used by 
anyone, and we can easily add more stream types later if we actually want to 
use them

> if some programs don't support these features, these streams could simply
> be ignored;
yes, a player/decoder should allways ignore stuff it doesnt understand ...

> the programs don't even need to know anything about their
> format. There could be, for example, a menu stream (fourcc "MENU" or so),
> which contains a menu in whatever format you might come up with. Or a
> chapter stream (fourcc "CHAP"?) which contains the chapter info. Those
> streams would only have one packet, of course. If cou come up with a better
> format for those, you could simply pick a different fourcc, so everything's
> open for everyhting, without simple programs having to know about these
> advanced things. They just implement what they need/want.
> Even the index could be well off as one of those generic streams. Just put
> the index into one packet; the header tells you where it is, you can put it
> wherever you want, and you can repeat it as often as you want.
hmm, a stream has frames / keyframes / timestamps / ... this is not correct 
for chapter or index stuff

[...]

Michael