[MPlayer-users] Stream selection matroska vs others
John Philip
phip at spymac.com
Fri Feb 13 06:16:35 CET 2004
Mplayer handles the arguments to the -aid and -sid options differently
for matroska (.mkv) and other file formats. In other container formats,
the argument given to -aid or -sid is the stream number in the file.
For matroska however, the argument is the audio stream number for aid,
and the subtitle stream number for sid.
To explain, assume we have a .mkv file and an .ogm file with identical
streams, in this order: Video, Audio, Audio, Subtitle. If we wanted to
play the second audio stream and the subtitle stream, different
arguments are required:
file.mkv -aid 1 -sid 0
file.ogm -aid 2 -sid 3
Obviously, the -aid and -sid arguments need to behave consistently.
However, I think the new matroska behavior is preferable. The old
system, like is used for .ogm files, requires a user to know the order
of every stream in the file. The new system only requires a user to
know which audio stream they want, or which subtitle stream they want.
This is much more logical and much simpler to use.
Additionally, If mplayer did adopt this system, it would make further
sense to make have the arguments 1-based. If you want to play the first
audio track, you use -aid 1. If you want the second audio track, it's
-aid 2, and so on.
Thanks for your thoughts,
John
(using CVS tarball 20040212)
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