[MPlayer-users] Re: Free audio codec for .AVI files ?

[D Richard Felker III]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2004 at 09:38:47PM +0100, Alexander Noé wrote:
> >Sorry, I have better things to do than read nasty C++.
> >
> Like reading some matroska specs?

Already done it a long time ago.

> >resolving the laces (= hide their existence for something using that 
> >class) causes a neglectible
> >amount of extra code, compared to the size of the AVI or matroska 
> >parsers, or even writers.
> >
> >AVI parsing is totally trivial without seeking. And seeking is easy
> >too in proper VBR files. AVI demuxing only gets complicated when you
> >want to support files written by horribly broken programs that don't
> >even interleave audio, or interleave it incorrectly.
> >
> Only writing SRT and SSA subtitles to AVI, read them back and allow to join
> subtitle streams inside AVIs (including embedded SSA streams with styles
> incompatible to each other, requiring some more attention) is taking 40 
> kB of
> C++ code in avi-mux gui.
> And you call that 'easy'? Ah, ups, i forgot, you did not yet code an AVI 
> class
> that could read and write subtitles from and to AVIs....

AVI does not support subtitles. If someone adds a stupid hack for
them, and makes it difficult to write, that's their problem.

And no I haven't written a "class" for it because I'm not a moron
using C++... And 40kb is not small, it's huge.

> >This isn't very helpful, since timestamps only take 1 byte if done
> >correctly. Of course you use stupid 1/10**n based timestamps rather
> >than a real time base, so your timestamps are very big.
> > 
> >
> 2 Bytes per block, not more than 5 bytes per cluster. Assuming one 
> hundred blocks per
> cluster, the average is 2,05 bytes per block. For CFR audio, you can 
> easily put 50 frames
> into one lace, and use those 2,05 bytes for the timecode the first of 
> those 50 frames starts at.
> This is less than 1 byte per frame, isn't it. Only vorbis would not work 
> that way.
> Even with small laces (lets say 100ms with mp3), it is less than 1 byte 
> per frame.

Video, not audio.

> >Wait, how can you even play the file if there are no timestamps on the
> >individual frames and the file is VFR? This makes no sense. 
> >
> It is assumed to be gapless if a timecode is  'missing'?

This is meaningless for VIDEO. Again, all my questions are about
VIDEO, not audio!!!

> >There must
> >be some way to get the timestamps... For audio you get durations in
> >samples by decoding, so that works, but with video, the codec normally
> >cannot tell you the correct frame duration.
> > 
> >
> For CFR, the codec does not need to tell anything, and for VFR video, 
> lacing is not recommended.

OK, thanks for the answer.

> >By the way, why does Matroska invent its own silly names for things
> >which already have nice established names? Just to confuse critics so
> >you can insult them when they try to explain how bad Matroska is?
> >
> Again wrong. It uses the same silly names as Xiph does.

OK, apologies. I should blame Xiph for this crap instead.

Rich