Hi there !

Excited by the perspective our MCF format could be interesting as a container format for audio also i am posting this poll here .... well i guess there is some more room for this in the forum :

As always, i'd love to hear also some comments why you voted one or the other, and of course also if one option is missing.

A thread about MCF feature requests was started here :
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/showth...=&threadid=1315 .

Ogg is here and ready to use already.

And I haven't really seen any real reason why it is not good enough for anybody's use. Yes, there is that article on MCF souceforge page, but apparently it wasn't written by someone who's well informed about the Ogg standard.

Question: Does Ogg support lossless encoding for archiving? Is there possibility to add cd-covers and lyrics or other text and binary data on Oggs?

Why i'm interested having these features on audio container, see thread about feature requests for MCF.

Yes of course. OGG is just a container format. I think the discussion of using FLAC as the lossless codec of choise for OGG is going on.

Well, the latest flac encoder from sourceforget can already encode into an ogg bitstream, so unless another developer of a lossless format gets inspired, flac will be the path of least resistance.

gnoshi

Correct ! But MCF will ( hopefully ) be on its way soon. And its L-GPL , so fully open to any other app using it.



I havent either. Its an excellent format, no question. But it seems there are a few useful things that are in the MCF specs and were not implemented into Ogg ... see the according threads here http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/showth...=&threadid=1303 and here http://www.powerdivx.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=350 .



I tell ingo he should do his homework better ...

Please, dont misunderstand me ! MCF was never targeted towards being an audio container format. I am posting this poll to find out if users feel there could be use for it .... if it turns out people dont want it we leave it as it is now .... being a great, modern AVI replacement.

The point is that, imho, MCF is not interesting neither as audio nor as VIDEO container format. Firstly, every thing that can be stored in a bitstream + perfect a/v sycronisation is possible with an OGG format, and secondly it'll just bring another confusion and "format war" (even when this is just a container format) among users, thus reducing the possibility for any hardware support and widespreadness, while Microsoft and MP4 licencing committee bastards will laugh happily behind our backs. This point is very important in this stage of "format war" and OGG should be used whenever it's possible. Even the .ogg extension may be a promotion for some ogg-unaware users
Anyway, if you'd just extend your poll so the answer about this format's uselessness both for audio and video could be included, I think you'd see that this is not only my oppinion...
There are still so much things possible with ogg that are yet-to be standartized... I think that the best way to contribute is to coopperate with Monty and work on a standartising...

Correct me if I wrong,
Corvin

Good. Hopefully somebody adds support for Monkeys Audio.

But is it possible to add pictures, lyrics and other text or binary files to Ogg's? Is there any mention of this in the Ogg specs?

It is your opinion and you are entitled to have it. MCF at this point has strengths and weaknesses comparred to OGG. They are intended for slightly different uses. MCF is not aiming for hardware support right now. It is just wanting to provide a better solution than AVI and a different solution from OGG.

Microsoft and MP4/MPEGLA be damned. They are so tied up in licensing and politics(Plus Microsoft is busy with backstabbing and theft) to beat out such formats. If you want to use MP4 the MPEGLA at this point is going to license you out of house an home. And Microsoft doesn't play nice with anyone other than Microsoft or their puppets. You put something in a Microsoft format don't expect to play it much anywhere else.

OGG or MCF. Who will win? Who should win? Why should we want a winner? It is my belief that due to their differences they will co-exist and compete. And that would benefit us all. If MCF is aiming to take off and penitrate the commercial market immediatly they are going about it all wrong. There is not a corporation or business force behind it. But that is because that is not the aim or major goal of MCF. OGG on the other hand could.

I for one will not freak if I have a number of choices for formats. Choice is good. I have always been one of the first to play with anything I can get my hands on. I will use the tool/format that is right for the job. Of which Microsoft's formats are all useless. And MP4 is limited. OGG shows great promise for streaming and other storrage. And MCF is shaping up to be robust featurefull format.

Well, what can I say... I agree that competition is generally a good thing, but it's also proven that in wartime one big joined force may win in battle where a several small forces can't. Even when each was trained well and all... I think you see what I mean. Anyway, I hope you'r right and we'll not suffer from the consequences of this competition as I beleave, but enjoy from them... If this's the case I'll be very happy about my own mistake

I have to agree with Neo Neko's response. Choice is almost always better in every situation.

It seems to me we could make a more informed answer to this question if the Ogg specs were more complete. I recall mention that the specs still have alot of info left out.

I was just pondering the ability to add lyrics, covers, etc to ogg files when i really stopped and thought about it.
I mean, sure some of you obviously do want to add cover art to the files, and so on and so forth, but I really just want my music to be music; lyrics, fine, karaoke could be mildly amusing, but cover art?

Not to have a go at those of you who want cover art embedded in their files, but I am just not convinced that inside an audio file is necessarily the best place for the cover art; especially not if you are not ripping the entire CD as a single file.

Excuse my post... I have a point, but I'm too tired to get it across effectively and inoffensively.

gnoshi

If history has shown anything at all, it's that the best format won't 'win'... the most popular one will. 'Nuff said.

@fewtch

Seems I could equate your statement to Apple and Microsoft:D

You do have a point though.

It is not the task of tags to store covers or lyrics.
They have to be stored outside the audio stream.
Tags should be at most something around 2 KByte.
This is enough to store links to external references.

Audio files are to store audio, image files are to store images
and text files are to store text.

Cover images are stored as normal JPEG outside audio stream

Album.front.jpg
Album.back.jpg
Album.titles.txt
Album -- [01] Title1.ogg
Album -- [02] Title2.ogg
Album -- [03] Title3.ogg
Album -- [04] Title4.ogg
Album -- [05] Title5.ogg
Album -- [06] Title6.ogg
Album -- [07] Title7.ogg
Album -- [01] Title1.lyrics.txt
Album -- [02] Title2.lyrics.txt
Album -- [03] Title3.lyrics.txt
Album -- [04] Title4.lyrics.txt
Album -- [05] Title5.lyrics.txt
Album -- [06] Title6.lyrics.txt
Album -- [07] Title7.lyrics.txt

Hi Frank, wir kennen uns schon lange, auch wenn Du Dich evtl. nicht mehr erinnern kannst ... Deutsches Usenet audio etc. ... lange Diskussionen über den Sinn/Unsinn Samplingfrequenzen über 44.1 KHz zu haben ....

Back to subject : We're not alking about tags here. MCF will offer the possibility to store up to 8 files ( whatever you want ) with your movie ( or audio ). lyrics could easily be stored as subtitles.

.. outside the stream, yes, but not outside the container !


Please allow me to say this is IMH a rather, well 'conservative' opinion

I personally don't want another format, but if MCF would hit big I would appreciate it.
I think OGG is very promising, at least after v1 is been worked on and tuned I will consider changing to OGG.
I don't trust OGG yet tho, I miss all the finetuning - but understand there are more importand issues worked with currently.
If MPC would get more "approved" and some hardware support I think I'd stick to that until (if) OGG would match up with MPC.

I think this is correct for pure audio/video container such as ogg but how about a general multimedia container like MCF?


Apart from making "virtual cd's" of my collection i have other interest for this:

Few years ago i bought an cd-EP "Shelter" by Lu & Jii HOO, which is pseudonym of house music producer Jori Hulkkonen. This EP is digipack so it looks much more cooler and is generally more pleasing than regular plastic cd-single. This digipack has nice looking visual design which suites music well. Unfortunately I couldn't find good picture of it from net and i don't have a scanner, but here is small picture and some info about it:http://www.forcedexposure.com/artists/lu.and.jii.hoo.html

At the time i was very interested (and still am) about MPEG4-technology. I read about "content protection" technology on MP4's and there was comment that MP4-file format supports adding lyrics, texts, pictures and other stuff on MP4-musicfiles. I don't remember exact details about it and i can't find the article. Maybe Ivan could comment on this? (BTW Liquid Audio files support these kind of features, if you install LA Winamp plug-in you can see picture and simple song details on minibrowser.)

Anyway, i like electronic and dancemusic and it is mainly released as 12" vinyl singles for dj's. Only way to get hold of these songs is from collections or to buy those vinyl singles (expensive). So I though that it could be cool to put up webshop where you could buy these songs and remixes as MP4's. I thought that it would be nicer to own these songs when they have lot's more to them than just the music. And from marketing point of view, extra features would make buying and owning these songs much more attractive.

Looking at the graphics of EP gave me ideas and thoughts on how i would have done an digital version of this cd. I was thinking that when you play MP4 on Winamp and you open Minibrowser, it would show you picture from front cover. When you click on different ares of picture it would lead to other pages where you would see song details or other info/entertainment with pictures, graphics, text and maybe with some Flash effects and/or game. Basicly you could browse pages on MP4-file like a very small closed website with only a few pages, limited multimedia and data which is related to the song.

I'm not thinking anymore about putting up webshop for selling MP4-songs, as i don't think it would work in practice because of security and other issues. But idea of creating full-featured "product" of invidual songs with extra visual and content features fascinates me. Of course there's problem with bloating on files with extra stuff, but i'd keep it simple and limit to few JPEG pictures, some text and vector-based multimedia, as text and vectors would compress well. I remember something that MP4-audiofiles would use Huffman compression for compressing extra media inside them.


Right now there's no clear idea on how DVD-style visual menus are going to be implemented on MCF, there is some talk about it on Powerdivx forums at this thread: http://www.powerdivx.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=273

Hopefully it will be something which i and others could use in audio-only MCF, as i'm interested moving my cd collection with pictures of cd-booklet/front paper to MCF-files.


(uhh.. it took me many hours to compose this message, hopefully it makes some sense as i feel that writing comprehensive large messages is difficult for me and because english is not my main language it's even more harder. )

Frank:

'Audio files are to store audio, image files are to store images
and text files are to store text. '

You were already my hero - but now even more so

Ref: www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1303

Cheers,

Olly.

Yeah - but we must remember MCF isn't an audio format, nor a text format, nor an image format... - it's a container format. So, you should be able to throw inside it pretty much whatever you want.

If you want to use just the audio stream, than you don't need the container - I.E, there's no reason to throw a MP3 stream (I mean a SERIOUS MP3 stream, without ID3 tags) inside MCF if you don't want to throw in anything else.

Just my 0.02

Regards;

Roberto.

[14:02:11] <tangent3> xiphmont: is the ogg format capable of embeding dvd-style menus? cover art?
[14:02:17] <xiphmont> yeah

So... what other 'problems' are there with Ogg, you were saying?

I think that's the main problem with OGG. It's possible to do things but since you rely on people that don't have time to do it, it's not likely to be done soon. MCF people are really into it and doing only that. So they will probably progress faster. (and having a consitant standard is the base of MCF).

I think xiph should concentrate on their codec, while some other people take care of the container.

Also everything can be done in AVI too... Why not simply extended it with open experimentations ? Instead of creating OGG...

Simple: in MCF you can attach files (the covers) and also link files...

So you could have
file1-track1
file2-track2 (all with 0 gap like on a CD)
file3-track3
...
file12-track12
file13-only cover inside

I guess a LOT of people will like that...

Well, i do.

How these covers or extra info is presented on players? Should there be Winamp-style minibrowser or something else?

This is the main problem here...
If it's pictures they should be considered as pictures.
As you can attach anything, it could be anything...

But I think there is the MIME type for each file attached (should verify that in the specs) your OS could handle each attachement separately.
Then it's up to the player to handle images and audio like Winamp could do.

Well, seeing that Ogg Vorbis is an open sourced project, there's nothing to stop people from actually working with Xiph to develope the Ogg container while the main Xiph guy (Monty) goes on to develope Vorbis. All that needs to be done first is to open a dialogue with the Xiph people.

One of the most important things that (IMHO) make very sense to develop MCF is internal support for INTERLACED VIDEO.
(even if codec doesn't not support it....
...very simple: encoding two parallel "lines" of frames )

Most of videos, specially *live* video can be found (or must be) in interlaced format (DV or MPEG-2), this permits 50 frames per second (human eye can easily notice the fluidity abyss difference between 25 and 50 ) at expense of 25 progressive frames (in terms of bitrate).

Encoding *real* interlaced content with a "progressive" codec using any kind of deinterlacing filter (even the best) give unrecoverable image *DETAIL LOSS*. TRUST ME.


Interlaced video is widely used today and will be also strongly used tomorrow...


So interlaced support is real a GOOD innovation for MCF.

Ooooops! Topic titles talks about *audio container* ...

...MCF is rather interesting for video.