Last month as I was cycling across the French Pyrenees and somewhere somehow there was a place where political party's, taking part in the European Elections 2004 could promote their point of view. What kind of a party could an would take a position against OGM and why ? They would certainly not get my vote !
Most probably this party - the LCR-LO somekind of com. party - was meaning Organismes Génétiquement Modifiés or Genetic Modified Organisms.
Nevertheless is was quite shocking to see this in this kind of desolate place...




zoomed : http://users.skynet.be/bk159929/temp/crop.jpg

ChristianHJW will probably use this picture in his obsessive anti-OGM crusade.

lol

Excellent find and a fine candidate for an avatar!

I wonder when people will realize that "Genetically Modified Organism" is a poor label at best for transgenic crops and livestock given the numerous and substantial genetic modifications that domesticated organisms have undergone through crossbreding and inbreeding alone....

Probably never

Awwww, .

That picture shall be the new frontpage of matroska.org

Well, DDT was quite a mess.
Many engineering mistakes have made good things. ( Teflon was a mistake if I recall correctly)
I hope the engineers don't make a big mistake and make a serious bio hazard.

in my what ?

Why should i invest energy into this, OGM is history already since a long time now, Ogg Theora and matroska on the opposite are the living and growing alternatives.

As a matter of fact, its MP4 and its rapid growth and development thats causing me a lot of 'worries' when i am thinking about our 'baby', named matroska.

But there are two hearts beating in my chest :

First, i am extremely happy to see that MP4 is more and more becoming a standard, and people consider more and more to quit using AVI ( which really should have been dead since long already ), and are switching to MP4. Of course, there are also matroska users switching over to MP4, but thats our own fault because we havent released anything new in the last couple of weeks, and MP4 development is going quite nicely.

On the other side, i am still convinced that MP4 will never be able to replace AVI completely, because as a standard container for content distribution, most of the supporting companies will try to keep it 'clean' and stick to the specified MP4 codecs IMO. Of course, i am well aware that MP4 can hold all kinds of stuff in principal ( bond was never tired to tell us ), but i am pretty convinced this will never happen, at least not with wide spread support.

matroska's only chance to survive, and i repeated that many times during the last months, is if we are successfull to weave it into a standard multimedia platform, similar to VfW, DirectShow or Quicktime, but completely open and x-platform. We'll soon release our first Windows port of Gstreamer ( hopefully ), and robux4 was thinking loud already about a MacOSX port, i heard .

If we succeed in creating a simple but powerful codec API , sitting on top of Gstreamer, wrapping its plugin API, and allowing to create self made codecs with matroska container, we might have a chance to survive.

Otherwise the same will happen to us as happened to OGM already :

R.I.P.

About Ogg Theora, there is no doubt it has a splendid future ahead of it .... but not because its technically superior, but only because its patent free, which of course is a very very strong argument for it. And by no means does Ogg Theora 'compete' with matroska, in fact they are completely different animals ......

It's off-topic anyway so i'll just have a go...

Why are these things a matter of life and death? They are containers people, not living objects. anyway:

It might very well be that you have wished to see AVI die a long time ago. But to be replaced by what exactly?
- OGM? except for vorbis sound hardly an improvement... (unless you like overhead )
- MP4? hardly any usuable or reliable tools besides the 3ivx muxer (I've tried them). And there's the fact that comparing AVI with MP4 is comparing apples and oranges (like you said)
- Matroska? well, it should be the successor of AVI, but it lacks an editing tool amongst other things. Muxing apps seem to be ok but it is ironic though that one is made by Alexnoe

So I am glad AVI is still around or else we'd all be using WMV right now

One last thing: if Matroska doesn't come through because of MP4 then thats the end of the development in video editing. All of us (or at least the non-DVD rippers/capturing people) will be stuck using AVI for the rest of our lifes then.

so I say: LONG LIVE AVI (for as long as we need you), LONG LIVE MP4 (but the hardware player support better be good) and LONG LIVE MATROSKA

I don't wanna go into this container arguments with ChristianHJW or anyone but I don't think OGM is dead. It may be a hack and never get any hardware support. It is much worse (imo) than Matroska and has a very big overhead. But I wouldn't say it's dead. I still can easily find (where, you may ask... I'd say "generally speaking" ) more .ogm files than .mkv files, even recent ones.

cya

... .....


I guess this will change pretty quickly now, there is constantly being worked on both players and muxing tools, and from companies like Ahead even, who certainly do have the power to push this trough, its just a matter of time, and for 'content sharing' ( both legal and illegal ones ) it will be a HUGE step forward compared to making DivX AVI's or S-VCDs .....



Being a mod on the Virtualdub support forum yourself, its no surprise to me that you, StefanV, have understood what matroska needs to become more accepted as an AVI successor. Virtualdub and other editors can do something that no other MP4, matroska or Ogg tools can do, they can handle AVI content with many different codecs, as long as those are available as VfW or ACM codecs. This is giving the users of AVI and incredible flexibility, and many codec developers today are still releasing their stuff for VfW, one way or another.

DirectShow, which in principal is the more powerful framework, lacks the same as matroska, this is a nice video editor like Virtualdub, and based on DirectShow.

All my hope is on Gstreamer and the Windows port we are working on right now. If we manage to make TCME a reality, and also do wrappings of some modern encoders following our codec API, we might have a realistic chance to become a new and flexible video editing standard !

...... alexnoe's AVI tools have left the VfW boundaries since a long time, thats why most of the AVIs his tools will produce can not be handled on Virtualdub anymore. I still dont see the sense in what he's doing, other than proving to us that AVI, in principal, can hold a lot of different stuff. But i am soooo glad we have him in the team, he is certainly an expert in containers now, and many good input into the project was coming from him in recent times.

Is there a general use codec API for WMV, other than DirectShow ? Will the M$ tools even allow to create own codecs that can be used on their video editors ?


If matroska doesnt come true, there is only one being guilty, and thats us, the matroska team. The acceptance from the community and other developers making multimedia tools is still excellent, but we havent made any progress lately, mainly because of RL issues for most team members and lack of motivation.

Also, the hurdles we have to overcome in the next months are pretty high, and all our calls for help to developers to join us were unheard ....... well, we'll see what the future will bring for us .....

I'll soon explain why it is a piece of <put some word here that is censored>. Now that I have (almost) finished matroska and AVI file format docus, I have time for that.

As this discussion here is OT anyhow ( and was moved to the right section accordingly ) ... where would you go to find out what container is 'generally speaking' used more today ?

jigle was gone with sharereactor, and if i do an unrelated search for 'ogm' or 'mkv' on emule, i get much more than 300 hits for both, so i dont know how you could find out if there are more MKVs or OGMs on the most used p2p network today.

Not that i would use this service, this was just out of curiosity, to see what container was used more by content sharers .....

I have worries though, if I understand bond correctly there will be things like Ahead certified devices. So it could turn in to the same "disappointment" as with DivX. Instead of MP4-players we get Ahead-players, like we don't have MPEG4-in-AVI players now, but DivX-in-AVI. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing though, I mean without DivX there probably wouldn't be a lot of hardware players, period. But still... it wouldn't have the interoperability i hope it to have.


Well, you probably know how Avery feels about DirectShow, quite recently:

(so, do a good job with your stuff )

I do though, people need to stop talking crap about AVI. MP4 and Matroska people (i don't necessarily mean developers) owe more to AVI then they think. Imagine where MPEG4-codec development would have been without AVI. Exactly nowhere, cause we never would have had a container to put it in (thats what I meant with my WMV-comment). And where would the MP4-container be without MPEG4-codec development? Also nowhere. We'd all be using WMV. (or RM) (well, there is, dare i say it, MPEG1 too of course )

So if people say "this is a hack" and "AVI can't do that" without having ever read one word of the AVI-specs it is enough reason to prove them wrong. MP4 and Matroska are superior to AVI without having to talk crap about it, so lets all be fair.

For a while i was afraid that people might come bugging Avery on the forum for adding MP4/Matroska/DS-support, because of the anti-AVI/VFW campaigns that have been held. I'm glad that this hasn't happened though, it saves me a lot of trouble.



AVIMux GUI might not be fully compatible with VirtualDub, but VirtualDub is not a fully compliant AVI-editor either of course. As a side note: people who need to open their muxed stuff in VirtualDub afterwards are weird as muxing usually is the last thing you should do.

Anyway, you guys have my full support. Keep on the good work! MP4 developers too of course!

ChristianHJW: check the anime scene, for example.

About the emule search. Restrich the search to small servers (one at a time), for example, so that it's harder to get to the 300 hits limit. Try using the filehash engine. Try searching some p2p communities forums.



OK, but that's not my point. My point is: "Is it dead? I don't think so". Why? Cause it's still used, and I think more used than ".mkv".

Like I said, I agree that Matroska is a better container than AVI, OGM, whatever. But I think it's not correct to say that OGM is dead. Just that, period.

cya

OK, I'll buy the dead part if it means "it's a hack, Xiph doesn't endorse it and hasn't seen any development, neither its tools".

cya

I just read about some thingy alowing the PS2 to play back ogms. It is sold at the German Saturn store. (dunno if it already has been posted here, as I don't follow every thread )

regards

I read somewhere at the PS2reality forums that they are considering supporting OGM. They already support Ogg Vorbis, so adapting it to support Vorbis + M4V inside OGM should be more or less trivial.

Maybe you mean the QCast Tuner http://www.broadq.com/qcast2.htm I believe it supports OGM.

No need for Christian to make Matroska people look bad: As i'm not a member of the matroska team (something some idiots still have to learn), I can freely collect issues that make the developement for OGM difficult, as well as its use uncomfortable: http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~noe/Video-.../containers.pdf . Will be updated whenever necessary

I read it twice.

Cya

I wonder how long will it take until Christian registers burnallogms.org

its already taken

I already gave the answer to that, read above. Never, because OGM is dead already, so why should i bother. Sure, some people are still using it, but as stated by other members here, there has been no progress for months and Xiph are clearly stating, and even in public now, that OGM will not be supported by their future tools. So, why should i care ?

It's good enough for an Avatar