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

[Michael Niedermayer]

Hi

On Friday 07 February 2003 19:14, Robert R. Wal wrote:
> 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
nice, i didnt know that avi/wav is based on that

sadly we cant use iff, it would have been cool to use such a old format :)
1. 32bit limit (4gb max ...)
2. 32bit ids, especially english words, are likely to occur in the data itself 
which makes resyncing after an error not foolproof (it should work in 99.8% 
of the cases but random 64bit is better ...)
the constant 32bit long stuff is allso a few byte larger instead of our 
current frame headers ...

[...]

Michael