Please allow me to announce the creation of a new open source Media Container Format, named 'matroska'

Project page is here http://sf.net/projects/matroska ; homepage is http://matroska.sourceforge.net , HTML should be online soon.

Steve 'robux4' LHomme and myself have left the MCF project because of incompatibilities of our work with the project goals defined by the founder of MCF ( TMF ), Lasse 'Tronic' Karkainen, especially with respect to the latest specs Steve had been writing and documenting here http://matroska.sourceforge.net/specs/ ( replace libmcf with libmatroska, will be updated soon ) .

Tronic himself could not be actively participating on the project lately, due to the fact that his courses at university didnt leave him much time to do so. Steve and myself have been developing the project further, and now we find ourselves in the situation that the result of this work does not comply with the goals the original project leader was defining for it. As a consequence we decided to leave MCF and found our own project.

matroska will of course be based on MCF, but the EBML based specs that were developed together with Frank Klemm ( main MPC developer ) make the format very extensible on the one hand, but harder to parse on the other hand. Steve and myself do believe that easiness of parsing is a minor thing today, with respect to the fast development of modern CPUs, but extensability has proven to be a steady issue for container formats, as nobody can predict what future requirements may be.

EBML, being a kind of binary equivalent to XML, can be supported on all platforms easily and we hope that by using it we can differentiate our project from other known containers significantly.

I am personally not happy about the fact that we had to found a new project, but it seems that it was the only alternative now. Of course we are well aware of the fact that both projects will become weaker this way, but we hope to be able to release the container including creation tools and playback filters until January/February 2003, and then the users will decide what format they prefer.

About the project name : we needed one quickly and amongst the numerous trials to find a 'friendly name' for MCF matroska seemd to be the best one. As it was Frank's idea and we knew he wouldnt mind we went for it, but please be aware we will listen closely to your considerations in this respect, as nothing has to be made in concrete yet.

Thanks for your interest


ChristianHJW
matroska project administrator

So what about the name? Does it mean something? Sounds Russian....

"matroska" sounds like some weird secret militar operation......
What about MSK for the extension?

"Matroska" sounds good to me, I like the name.
Does that mean we have OGM, MP4, MCF and Matroska as new standards? Also I´m too young to remember the time with VHS, Beta and Video2000, but I know the crappiest won and for the user that many formats weren´t good. But which of them is the crappiest?
I don´t know if it was a good idea to start directly after leaving one project an new one, that will make a lot of confusion.
I know it´s hard to give up all the work/time you spent on it in the last year, but I would have probably done something that helps the users to have only one format: ask Tobias to make his project open-source and ask to help him. I already ask him what´s with making the project open-source, he said that he is going to split the filter in several parts, all the decoding dlls will be open-source, for the rest he don´t know yet.
Will somebody else leave MCF to join Matroska?

matroshka is an old Russian toy, with many puppets contained in each other .. it was Frank's idea, he may give a better background hopefully ...

Well, matryoshka / matreshka are those souvenir nesting dolls, tourists usualy buy in Moscow. So nesting of formats was behind the name, I guess.

Actual matroska makes less sense here IMO. It is sort of warm woollen ahhm... shirt? (long-sleeved t-shirt) with horizontal stripes. Seamans weare those (seaman = matros).

Excellent name for an excellent project! Very clever, Frank.

/ Uosdwis

To finally give us that warm and fuzzy feeling also when it comes to video encoding.


The first thing that came to my mind was actually a female sailor: matros - matroska. Was just a guess but makes about as much sense as the striped t-shirt.

This post has been edited by ErikS: Dec 8 2002, 00:21

This makes me want to bang my head against the wall repetitively. Does every project which has complications with internal politics have to end up with a fork of the project? In my opinion, kudos to the vorbis guys - I dont see a fork in sight!

But really, this is no good at all, and both formats arent really formats at all as it stands, from a user standpoint.

Ruairi

To make us forget about cold and unfriendly AVI?

Actually sailor's wife . There are no females in the marine.

BTW, John, tell us again about OT posts with large user posted imgs.

Here's Monty's comment about Matroska: http://www.xiph.org/archives/advocacy/0455.html

How about just 'ska'?

Uhm... this is not a good notice (for me).
Sincerly i don't agree with the choise of build more and more containers.
This could make only confusion, and surelly they'll can't be a "standard".

from Ogg Traffic for Sunday, November 24, 2002


I think that if the open source community will focus on a realiable standard we can all benefit from it.

I know that is really difficult to put ideas together to build a cool container, but (in my opinion) is better to work on OGG media container...

Anyway, Open Source means freedom, so this is only a consideration.

Chris, it was my idea to link the name of the toy to the format. And Frank gave us some feedback on the name. Well, it seems that he was wrong in the spelling (is it MATPËWKA is russian ?). But anyway we modified the names he gave us to finish with MATROSKA. So the idea was the toy, it was wrong, but it's not the exact translation anyway.

Well, apparently you never used the unsupported OGM format...

Also, as an answer to another message, we don't start the new project from scratch. We just use what we've been building for the last months in the new project, as the old one rejected it, and most of us consider it's superior. It just makes sense, it's an evolution, not a revolution. Maybe MCF development will continue (as slowly as it always did).

Actually that's our goal. We share the same idea as for MCF (as we evolve from it) : create a portable container that is easy, versatile and can be used on all possible cases. So far it seems to be the case (need to be proven with working code). We are missing a brother to this project : the codec API. We hope the UCI project (Universal Codec Interface) which also aims to be widely portable will become reality too.

and here is my answer :
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video....o.uci.devel/224
and Monty's one :
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video....o.uci.devel/225

All streams created with newer versions are completly OGG comaptible. I can anylyse the file with ogginfo, it will tell you that there is one not supported stream (the video) in it and one vorbis stream, but doesn´t report any errors. OGM is not supported by xiph, but it´s not out of the ogg-specs.

Well, I don't know if that goes in the definition of fork or not.

Anyway, Matroska is not compatible with MCF. We have been redesigning the format with a new (modern) approach, but still keep a lot of ideas of MCF. That's why the 2 projects are now split. In most cases, if not all, the overhead produced by Matroska will be smaller that the one of MCF and hopefully of OGG too (even for Vorbis). That's one of the major advantage of Matroska B)

Yes, it looks m0r3 or le55 like that.

BTW when you reach the point, that you'll be about to release something in binary form, hope we'll gonna be the first ones to know it.

Sure, Christian is in charge of that and he knows all the good places
I hope one of the first audio codec (after PCM which is really basic) we'll have in Matroska will be MPC (as Frank Klemm has been helping us a lot, while he was looking for a good container for MPC).

another format


holy crap.......

We already have tons of audio format out here (ACC,MCF,Ogg,WMA,Mp3,mp3 pro,etc)


Why they don't just unite and make a very very best format...instead of split and fight each others

"Why they don't just unite and make a very very best format...instead of split and fight each others"

MCF/new_thing aren't actual audio formats, they're container formats, to store ogg/whatever streams.

I suggest you start a new thread if you want that question answered - it's kinda off topic in this thread.

The question of the splitting can be discussed here.
Most people involved in MCF are now focusing on Matroska because they think it's the very best. MCF has some advantages, but considered minor (fixed sized data at given position).

We all know how bad AVI is for VBR. MPEG-1/2 can only contain their own codec. MPEG4 is complicated. And OGG seem to be missing a lot of things we've designed in Matroska/MCF that I consider essential (like granule position vs timecode). That's what make us think that Matroska is good (easy to upgrade with keeping full backward compatibility). It took a lot of time to reach that point, but it was worth it !

B)