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

[Robert R. Wal]

On 03.02.07 Fabien Tassin pressed the following keys:

> nope. No need to add a stream to have chapters, menu and similar features.
> Streams are for video, audio and subtitles.
> Macro blocks are for headers/index/chapters/gadgets and should be at
> the beginning or at the end, not interleaved.
> In ASF, chapters are optionals and described in 0 or 1 'marker' object.
> Scripts are also optionals and described in 1 'script command' object.
> It is good enough for me.

Before I read even more brilliant suggestions about groundbreaking
features of ASF I suggest everyone to google for IFF format
specification (from mid or early eighties) on which all multimedia
formats from Microsoft are based[1]. However ego-boosting reinventing
the wheel may be, it's good to know what _has been_ achieved in
fileformats realm to this date and what to avoid.

I'm not suggesting to clone any existing format, just read what's been
done and choose what worked and what didn't.

Recommended reading:

http://www.borg.com/~jglatt/tech/aboutiff.htm
http://www.rahul.net/jfm/avi.html
http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/doc/oggstream.html
http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/doc/framing.html

Not recommended reading/inspiration:
(overly complicated, implementation based instead of solution based
design and general brain damage)

QT/MOV fileformat
MCF
Matroska

Robert

PS. I'm amazed by multiplicity of broken multimedia formats when after
reading several specs one realizes that all that is needed is
some typed-chunk based format with provisions for streaming,
seeking, error recovery/stream resynchronisation.

[1] properly written IFF parser from Amiga parses without any trouble
 WAV and AVI files after you add provisions for reading BE/LE values.

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