I'd like to ask for some help from those who are the experst of this topic. I've got the task of creating a comparison and more or less (ok, less) in-depth analysis of container formats in use today. I did some link collecting, reading-through-boring-specs, forgetting-it-all-the-next-day so far, but I still need lots of help... Yes I'm a noob but trying to improve.

I was thinking of choosing RIFF (that's the official name for it, right?), MPEG-4, Windows Media, Ogg and Matroska to be in the focus of the paper. (Did I miss any other popular format?) For the points of comparison, my ideas so far are: what it can contain; how many tracks/streams/whatever it can contain; is it streamable; how is metainformation stored (its structure, and if possibilities are predefined or not); is hardver support available/possible; overhead; editing possibilities (needs to reencode every time or can do it directly); interactive/menu stuffs possible; any kind of DRM included/possible. Do you think there is some other important point I might have missed?

I want to go into a bit more detail about the menus/interactive possibilities and DRM. I couldn't find much reading material on these so far, so my idea on how these things work is rather vague.
From what I've found so far, only MPEG-4 and Matroska has the possibility for a menu system, is that right? Do these restrict to "normal" DVD-like menus, or is it possible to make them more "intelligent", for example via scripts? I am thinking of things like mini-games in a children's movie, or (ok I'd hate this one but still) inserting advertisements.
As for the DRM, I am not sure how the already existing ways work, I have yet to do my little research on it. (Any links welcome!) I don't expect finding out too much, seeing how those are all proprietary formats (thinking of Windows Media especially, and the stuff Apple uses for iTunes). Are there any DRM solutions for the open source containers? Or if not, is there any planned/possible/etc.?

I also need less technical information, like: who uses it most likely/who was it designed for (universities, the industry, the girl next door, her total geek bro, etc...), when was the format born and why, such. Surprisingly, this seems to be the hardest to find, so could anyone please give me a link or a short summary to use as reference.

Also, if you could point me to any already existing websites/articles/books about this topic, I'd appreciate it a lot.

Sorry for asking so much, and thank you if you can help me in any way.

Maybe VOB. And you could mention MOV is quite similar to MP4 (actually, the truth is the other way around)



RIFF: Pretty much everything, although there are some limitations with VBR audio and advanced video algorithms like B-Frames encoding. There are ways to hack it in backwards-compatible form, like the DivX guys did to add subtitles and menus.
MP4: All MPEG4 videos, all MPEG4 audios, VRML, BIFS (menus and other interactive stuff), chapters, etc.
Windows Media: WMA, WMV
Ogg: Officially, Xiph codecs (Vorbis, Theora, Speex, FLAC). Extra-officially, other stuff like MPEG4 video and MP3.
Matroska: Pretty much everything



With the exception of RIFF, all of those are.



Hardware support is available for RIFF, Windows Media and MP4.



You should never need to reencode, only to rewrap. That is possible on all of those formats.


Edit: too many quotes, had to break down the post

In MP4 and Matroska. In RIFF, hackishly. Maybe in Ogg - I'm not sure.



MP4 (only iTMS) and Windows Media.



Well, popularity. RIFF is the winner by far. I would suspect the second would either be Windows Media (by the force of Microsoft marketing alone) or MP4 (by the force of Apple marketing alone)



Pretty much, yes.



MP4 is backed by a pretty powerful scripting language, part of MPEG4 Systems standard - BIFS. Dunno about Matroska.



Sure.



People are always planning these, but I think noone managed yet to come up with a real open source DRM method. There was a discussion around here ages ago if it was possible or not to create an open source DRM. Search for it if you are interested.

OpenDRM died. I'm not aware of any other real effort. But they probably exist.

Wha is meant with RIFF??? If you mean AVI just call it so, because AVI is a special case of RIFF.

*delete*