[MPlayer-dev-eng] HW for open standard video and audio formats (NO-SPAM)

[Rich Felker]

On Fri, Apr 22, 2005 at 12:33:43AM +0200, Luca Barbato wrote:
> > -Comparisons wrt complexity, format overhead, ability for a mixed SW/HW
> > solution etc.
> 
> I haven't the time to set up a testcase. The current nut is quite low on
> overhead and quite easy to parse, the new one won't change those
> results. Ogg problems come up when you need to use granulepos for sync
> or you start thinking about muxing audio and video on it. mkv is a bit
> hungry of resources and overdesigned but has lots of documentation.

Basically all true. :)

NUT is designed to provide all the essential information for _proper_
playback and editing without having to have any interaction with the
codec layer, i.e. everything you need is at the demuxer layer. It's
also rather simple to parse and has VERY LOW overhead and good error
recovery (ability to play damaged files, not repair them). Perfect
timestamps and indexing are also key features.

Ogg is basically the opposite. Huge overhead, heavy interaction with
the codec layer (i.e. parsing of codec packets) is needed for a valid
demuxer, and error recovery is virtually nonexistant even though they
waste space on crc. Also there's no index and broken timestamping so
it's slow and very difficult to seek accurately.

Matroska is, well yes, overdesigned. It has many of the advantages of
NUT, but lacks simplicity and exact timestamps, and has much greater
overhead although both are probably negligable except at VERY LOW
bitrates. Matroska has the advantage of actually having working
implementations, but it also has enough bloat to make it a pain to
support.

Rich