[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: Flaming NUT

[D Richard Felker III]

On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 07:21:37PM +0200, Peter Niemayer wrote:
> Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> >On Tuesday 04 May 2004 01:07, D Richard Felker III wrote:
> >
> >>On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 01:25:19AM +0300, Ivan Kalvachev wrote:
> >
> >[...]
> 
> What is really sad is that while the flame-wars move back and
> forth between Matroska and NUT advocates, the damned obsolete
> ".avi" container remains the most used / best supported.
> 
> There certainly are advantages in both directions, but the world
> would be a better place if _either_ NUT or Matroska would take
> AVIs place.
> 
> For the average user, the question which media container has
> stable software support, available on many platforms including
> hardware players, is certainly much more important than
> which container may have a little less overhead or a little
> more nitty-gritty-features.
> 
> I think the flamewars should be postponed until mature, stable,
> free encoding/editing/player hardware/cross-platform-software is
> available for both formats... meanwhile, all spare time is better
> spent on making AVI obsolete, whatever that takes :-)

You partially miss the point. The reason people argue about NUT vs
Matroska (or any technical quality matter) is to discover the
requirements, goals, etc. that various users and developers have, and
the various design flaws, useful ideas, etc. that the candidates have.
It's not so much about burning one another to the ground, as figuring
out the right goals and making sure that the container that comes out
ahead will meet those goals. For NUT, which is not yet finalized, this
process is manifest in the continuing evolution of the spec. For
Matroska, which I believe has serious limitations, this goal is met by
encouraging people to adopt a better standard than Matroska.

For the immediate future, both are here to stay. Anime groups are
already using Matroska quite extensively, and will probably also use
NUT once there are good tools for taking advantage of the features. We
will also be working to promote NUT as the standard for streaming
media, since the current alternatives suck. (Even NSV which is
designed for streaming has much higher overhead than NUT, and it sucks
in other ways too.)

As far as replacing AVI for the 'scene' goes, warez monkeys will
always be idiots. Half of these losers still encode with NanDub and
DivX3, and even the "progressive" groups only use DivX5 or
occasionally XviD, never libavcodec's mpeg4 (which is a good bit
better)... I'm not saying it's a lost cause, but it'll take a long
time for them to convert. The anime scene is a much better target
since anime needs things like mixed-framerate, subtitles, etc.

Rich