Hi,

recent progress of mkvmerge, as well as the installer packs make it now possible to pack a complete Music CD, with

- one huge FLAC audio stream
- songs divided as chapters
- covers and booklets as JPEG attachements

possible.

Here is the Bittorrent Link to a new sample file we made, we call it 'Christmas Surprise' because its well Christmas related ....

To play it back, you need either jccston's fb2k matroska plugin ( i hope Peter will finish his Vorbis and FLAC packet decoders soon ) or the latest DirectShow playback 'matroska full pack' from http://packs.matroska.org . Its coming with a DShow FLAC decoder filter, and the matroska splitter will now recognize the codec ID for native FLAC and call the decoder when the playback graph is built ( this wont work with older splitters, so you need the latest one ).

To get access to the covers and booklets, you need the matroska shell extension . Right click on the file in explorer, and goto 'properties' 'attachements' ....

EDIT : I forgot to say that of course you can use any supported audio compression format you like for that, not only FLAC, be it

- MP3
- AAC
- HE AAC
- Vorbis
- FLAC
- AC3
- DTS
- MP2 ( maybe buggy ? )
- RealAudio ( Cook, ATRAC, RALF, etc. )

Chris... also do not forget The Core Media Player already supports this. Although you need to use the 'Media Streams' to switch tracks ATM. To access the picture attachment do this by right clicking the file in the ML, goto file properties, goto attachment tab and there is the attachment.

We are going to add additional keyboard shortcuts for MKA chapters as well as the ability to show .MKA picture attachments automatically in our next release.

Not working for me. I have windows 98. I have tried it in windows media player classic and foobar. I used flac and wav inside the matroska file. I couldn't play the flac one in foobar and in windows media player classic the sound was corrupted. The wav one sounded corrupted in foobar. I installed both the jccston's fb2k matroska plugin and the DirectShow playback 'matroska full pack'.

I haven't tested the sample file because I am on dialup.

In fact, i was told i am talking rubbish. With the current version of jcsston's fb2k plugin only MP3, AAC and maybe meanwhile Vorbis will work, because Peter has to make new 'packet decoders' so that he can decode audio streams stored in matroska. Sorry about this, it seems i dont really understand how fb2k is working yet



If you are using Media Player Classic, make sure to disable the internal matroska splitter, so that it will use the external, new splitter filter. Or try with WMP6.4 or TCMP.

... well, roughly 300 MB via dialup is maybe not a good idea, i agree ....

jcsston just told me this on IRC :

<jcsston> ChrisHJW: The mka fb2k plugin can playback FLAC, I wrote a packet_decoder patch for the foo_flac plugin and it is included in the foobar2000 0.7.6 on Case's site.


so, it SHOULD work ? Anybody having success playing the file ?

ok, i was doing the impossible and installed fb2k on my machine .... just pray for me that Blacksun doesnt read this here, he will kill me !!

The file plays perfect, but you need the beta installer from Case's site, it has the very latest matroska plugin with the FLAC patch ....

Thanx! Now it's working! In both foobar2k and media player classic, without disabling the internal matroska splitter for the second one:o

I have been hosting a file on my site for demonstration purposes of this plugin. Its using very low bitrate MP3, but it gives you an idea.
ELiZA WREN - Living on the Outside.mka (4.7MB)

Wow...
I'm downloading the 300mb deal now. I'm not sure I would use this (kind of like the ability to play one song off of one album without opening that whole album) but it does really show off the extensibility of the matroska format. Very Impressive!

Can't the OGM container already do all of this?

You cant mux FLAC into OGM right now, even if there is OggFLAC, simply because the OGM muxing tools have no idea about FLAC at all. On the other hand, Ogg itself has no chapters, only OGM has.

jcsston's CoreFLAC DirectShow encoder can encode FLAC into OGM just like any other ACM audio track, with a wFormat tag, but this has nothing to do with the official Xiph CoreFLAC implementation, and the files will not play with the other Xiph parsers.

Also, OGM has no way to add attachement files for the covers and booklets .....

AFAIK the QuickTime file format has been able to do this for a couple of years, too.

You can attach images in OGM? What about the orignal CUE sheet and TOC? Perhaps I should look at the specs...oh wait, it doesn't have any. Remember, OGM != Ogg. Ogg doesn't even have an official tagging system. All they have is a text based Comments section that you put whatever you want into it. Kudos for flexibility, but what if another program uses it some completely different way? Blam, incompatibility.

I could keep going, but the big place that Ogg has the advantage is when storing/streaming low bitrate Vorbis, Ogg SHOULD have less overhead.Quicktime is basically the opposite of Ogg in this respect. You could in fact do all of these things in .MOV. The problem is that it is a proprietary format that has very little support anywhere. How many tools will read/write QT? How many of those tools will let you attach pictures and other random files to the audio file? How about using one of those files as a thumnail for the file? What about storing FLAC in it?

No, Matroska is really the only acceptable solution here. (Excluding of course the possibility of putting an audio file, CUE sheet, and other files in a single ZIP file. But thats not really the same is it.)

I am using the matroska shell extension version 2.3 and it crashes every time that I try to save the attachments of the mka file. The attachements are a jpg and a txt file.

Okay... you say it works, but you don't give out a link? Come on!!! I've been looking for this for months! I downloaded the ELiZA WREN sample and it looks fantastic (though FB2K errored on the MP3 playback). The Christmas Surprise sample doesn't download for me. I only get 22k.

I wonder why it would produce an MP3 error? Do you have the latest fb2k install?

No. Had 0.7.4. Updated to 0.7.6 and it plays. However, it still leaves me without mkvmerge so I can't merge my stuff yet.

<whine>
<whimper>

I'm sorry, but it's just not true that the QuickTime File Format, or QTFF, is proprietary. There are several independent implementations of QTFF, and Apple has a public specification on their web site. Yes, the most common implementation is proprietary, but the format itself isn't. I have mentioned in previous threads the Apple-independent implementations in FFmpeg, MPlayer, OpenQuickTime, OpenQT and 3ivx. Other than that, Apple has an open source library called QTFile as part of Darwin Streaming Server, although I don't know much about it. There are several implementations available of QTFF, and some of them are actually in very widespread use.


None, I believe. The lack of FLAC support is probably due to the ugliness of the QuickTIme API The other features, however, could be probably be implemented, but I'd say the demand is limited.


This is your own, subjective opinion. I'm just saying that another alternative could be using a much more common file format.

BTW, does anyone know if it is (theoretically) possible to do this with the MP4 file format?

The 22k file is probably the .torrent file. Do you have a BitTorrent program installed? http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/

I can recommend burst!! as bittorent client, works like a charm for me ....

Just because there is public documentation and alternative libraries does not mean that it isn't proprietary. Quicktime is proprietary. To help understand, you must remember that things like MP3 are proprietary also.

But my point was that there isn't any application support for what we are talking about. I know about the QT support in several applications, but there isn't any existing support for the topic on hand.MP4 is essentially a limited subset of the QT format, so yes. If you can do it with quicktime, you could do it with MP4, just with a limited number of codecs. In other words, you could make a legitimate MP4 file using AAC and chapters.

Well, except that QT chapters aren't part of the MP4 spec (of course, you could still use them I suppose)