[MPlayer-users] Re: Quicktime: "No 'moov' atom could be found"

[Jonathan Rogers]

Moritz Bunkus wrote:
>>Xiph is working on Ogg Theora and they'll eventually be working on Ogg 
>>Tarkin. Hopefully, they'll define a generic way of putting video in Ogg.
> 
> 
> My guess is: not in the near future. Several people have tried often
> enough to contact them. Even Nic doesn't get all that much feedback from
> xiph, and he's the one pushing Ogm at the moment!
> 
> 
I guess the situation is grimmer than I imagined.

>>The main advantage Quicktime would have over Ogg and Matroska is that it 
>>is more standardized and widely implemented in the proprietary world.
> 
> 
> Yes. But Matroska has specs, Ogg doesn't (only very basic ones). I don't
> see Ogg winning the race for the Next General Purpose Container
> Format. Maybe Matroska doesn't win either.

Specification and standardization is very important, which is why I've 
been puzzled that people seem to be so willing to start from scratch 
rather than use a spec that already works (like Quicktime).

> 
> One problem I personally have with MP4 is purely a software issue. The
> two OpenSource libraries available (libmp4, libmp4v2) which are based on
> libquicktime are put under the Mozilla Public License. Unfortunately
> this lincense pretty much prohibits the source to be used together with
> GPL'ed source... (Read
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses
> or http://www.tomhull.com/ocston/docs/mozgpl.html if you're interested
> in the legal issues involved.)

It's very surprising that libmp4 would have that problem, since 
libquicktime is listed as being under the LGPL and has a copy of it in 
CVS. The FSF page says that the bare MPL is problematic, but a developer 
can make an MPL project GPL friendly. I'm having a little trouble 
finding libmp4; is it part of VideoLAN?

Jonathn Rogers