Hi,

i have the big pleasure to officially announce that the matroska multimedia container project has finally left alpha status and turned into public beta status last night. By following the links below you will be able to obtain various tools to create, edit and play matroska audio and video files on your computers. Supported Operating Systems are currently Windows and Linux, but it seems at least playback is working for Mac OSX and OpenBeOS also.

The beta release of these tools is the last and maybe most important of the three initial steps to make matroska a living reality in the opensource community. After almost 18 months of development, always in contact with developers from various other opensource projects in the multimedia environment, we were able to come up with a working specification for the container end of 2002. From this spec our chief developer and project administrator, Steve 'robux4' Lhomme, could code a working basic I/O library called libmatroska, which was released in alpha version to interested OSS developers beginning of this year. Since then all efforts were undertaken to make file creation and playback possible, and in the meantime the main library was steadily developed further to its actual status.

The matroska container is mainly aiming to replace the good old AVI , but it is also ment to be a powerful and open alternative to other, mainly proprietary, containers such as ASF, MP4, MOV, RM, MPX and even MPEG. It uses the extensions .mkv for video and .mka for audio only files .

Here the main features of matroska :

- opensource, open standard, GPL and QPL licensed main library
- supports arbitrary file sizes, ideal for PCM audio and prepared for HDTV
- allows arbitrary number of audio, video and subtitles streams in one file
- attempting to support every existing audio and video codec under the sun
- extensible by using EBML as underlying framework, a binary structure based on XML
- enhanced container features such as menues, chapters, tags, file attachements
- perfect sync thanks to timestamps for data blocks
- x-platform design approach right from the start
etc.


Links :

The release page ( constantly updated ) : !!!! http://www.matroska.org/announce.html !!!!
matroska's homepage : http://www.matroska.org
The project page : http://corecodec.org/projects/matroska
CVS tree : https://corecodec.org/scm/?group_id=20


Here a listing of the tools that are released today :

LINUX :

All existing tools, as well for matroska file creation as well as for playback, were made by Moritz 'mosu' Bunkus, the author of the well known 'Ogmtools' . He was implementing playback support into mplayer for Linux, and the matroska support code was commited to mplayer CVS a few hours ago. His file creation tools, and this includes the sources, can be found here : http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/ . The program, in its current status, will allow you to transmux every AVI, OGM or matroska file into a new matroska file, plus to add several external audio streams from either WAV or Ogg sources ( Vorbis ) as well as AC3 and MP3 audio, and SRT subtitles.

Currently Supported codecs :

Video : all VfW/VCM codecs ( DivX, XviD, etc. ) ; Audio : Vorbis, MP2, MP3, AC3, PCM ; Subtitles : SRT


WINDOWS :

File creation : The VirtualdubMod Team around Julien 'Cyrius' Coloos and Tobias 'Belgabor' Minnich have implemented matroska reading, editing and writing support in such a professional way that Windows users will not have to suffer from any major drawbacks compared to the well established AVI format. The program is released from its usual place on http://sf.net/projects/virtualdubmod .
Supported codecs are all : VfW/VCM codecs ( DivX, XviD, WMV9 VCM, ON2VP3, HuffYuf, H.264, 3ivx, MPEG4V3/2, etc. ) ; Audio : all ACM codecs , Vorbis, MP2, MP3, AC3, PCM

Playback, DirectShow parser : Our core developer Jan 'myFUN' Schlenker created the basis, and the great development team from 'The Core Media Player' , mainly Ludovic 'BlackSun' Vialle and Christophe 'Toff' Paris, were pushing it to the actual release status. Please note that there is currently work done on the implementation of seeking as well as subtitle support ( to follow soon ). Occasionally the player may freeze if the pause/stop button is pressed. The file can be downloaded here : http://matroska.sourceforge.net/downloads/...emux-v0.3.0.zip ; unzip it into any directory and run regsvr32 x:\path\kaxdemux.dll from a command line .

Playback : The Core Media Player Team have made a special release of their feature pumped DirectShow player, the TCMP RC4 'matroska release edition' , to be downloaded here : http://www.corecoded.com . Its coming with the latest parser filter and will install it automatically, plus it can easily be registered to playback matroska files.

MPA2MKA and WAV2MKA : Both programs allow the user to transmux PCM or MP2/3 audio file into matroska audio files and were developed by John 'spyder' Cannon and Jory 'jcsston' Stone . Link : http://matroska.sourceforge.net/downloads/mpa2mka.zip and http://matroska.sourceforge.net/downloads/wav2mka.zip .


Future Features/Codecs ( still to come ):

- Menues
- Chapters
- MPEG 1/2 video support
- special mode 2 form 2 burning with ECC/EDC
- Image Subtitles ( BMP and PNG )
- Gstreamer plugin
- Vegas video plugin
- Xine playback patch
- AAC audio support
- Theora support
- streaming server ( UDP and HTTP )
- file attachements ( lyrics, cover images, etc. )
- p2p plugins including file ID
- Nero plugin
- winamp plugin
etc.


We hope you will find the container useful and are looking forward to your feedback. Please adress all feedback either to the mailing list matroska-general at freelists dot org , join us on IRC.CORECODEC.COM #matroska or turn to the forum here : http://corecodec.com/modules.php?op=modloa...pBB2&file=index

Thank you very much for your interest and my apologies to those who may feel bothered by the long postl

Christian Wiesner

What happened to MPC and Frank Klemm?
Frank isn't even mentioned anywhere even though I believe he is the man behind the EBML idea..

JohnV you're totally right ! I forgot to add Frank Klemm to the list of major contributors. This mistake is now corrected because Frank was a major driving force in matroska's infancy. He is somehow the father of the format

MPC is not supported yet as SV8 is not here yet. But it will be the top priority when it's public (maybe even before).

Other than that we are all happy with this launch. We are now able to show it wasn't just a random idea

Yaaaaaaaay! New stuff to play with. I am all over it guys. Excelent job.
____________________________________________________________
Hmmmmm. Can't find RC4 yet and even after registering the DLL I can't get any DS player to render the file.

I am getting old ... or maybe i AM old already .. ???

Besides listing MPC as 'future' codecs to be supported i also completely forgot to mention FLAC and Wavpack as lossless codecs as well as the lossless audio and video capture idea .....

Well, the TCMP RC4 is actually stamped as "RC3 Matroska Edition", so don't worry the file is really there and working (for audio and video).

Congratulations! It's great to see new open standards developing. I will give it a try later today or this weekend.
dev0

good job fellas. Now Downloading.

Huzzah! Good work people!

Now to wait for Musepack SV8 and support for lyrics and covers in matroska and i'm ready to start archieving my cd-collection.

Why don't you wait for SV9 instead ? It's going to have Matroska v.2 support and will come with a hybrid (sub-band+transform) mode

Blah, MPC SV8 with matroska's lyrics & cover support is good enough for me.

Yeah I found that out later. Played kinda choppy. But it did play!

What about Monkey's Audio files?
The only drawback for me of this format is that if it gets corrupted, the whole file becomes unplayable.
Maybe we could put it into a Matroska container to make it streamable, as FLAC is, so you only loose the corrupted packet?
Dunno if it's possible.

If you can cut Monkey Audio data in "packets" that are self contained, then yes.

maybe i'm totally missing something ... but don't we allready have the ogg continer?

Ogg is really just for audio streams? with matroska you can add other stuff in with the audio.

I beleive OGG is a container format that can contain audio. eg. Vorbis. OGG should acccomadate many other formats though, such as video, images, different audio codec's et cetera.

I think that the container deveopment isn't particularly developed though, hence OGM started, and others are also developing their own ideas due to the lack of what OGG can provide at the moment.


I think i'm right about what i've said, but don't bet on it, i am only recalling form my vauge memory ;-)

Cheers,

Kristian

Yes OGG is a full container format for both video and audio. The official video portion is only now being addressed though. But it was intended from the start. OGG is more designed for streaming. TMF, MCF, Matroska was, is, will be a robust storrage and presentation format for those media types. There is a little overlap between the two. But in large part they compliment eachother.

What is the significance of a media container? Isn't the contained
format more important? What does the container offer?

Thanks guys.
You're doing a great job!

But when could we expect a release?
A Day, month, year, decade?

It offers space (matroska is always smaller than the OGM or AVI equivalent), error resistance, extra informations (tags, chapters, menus, attachements), synch facilities, etc.
Ie all the things a codec shouldn't have to do.

A release ? Well, there IS already a release. But it only support a fraction of all that we can do. We have a long list of TODO and try to make them real ASAP. But it takes a lot of time. So expect a few month before having a full featured implementation.
This week-end we'll have a decent playback in DirectShow, and some tags will already be able to be read/write in The Core Media Player.

Update

We have released a new set of tools/source than greatly enhance the playback of matroska files in DirectShow. It's available on the same announcement page.

This new set of tools is tagged as the "Iris release".

Any hopes for an external player for .mkv files, eg dvd player?

hopes : many

But you know the meaning of the word "hope". So we don't know if it will ever happen. As it is always the case for new technologies.

It would be cool if it could allow DivX and mpc in .mkv and then play it in a stand alone dvd play!!

Is DivX+mpc in mkv already possible with this container?

Any full list which I can have a look at to see which audio and video files are containable in the mkv container?

Does the name "Matroska" have anything to do with "Matrioshka Dolls" (there might be some relation in "containing", i.e. both Matrioshka Dolls and Matroska container contains similar type of things)? If so why not have a nice matrioshka logo?

1. New release : the new DirectShow filter is a great improvement to the first version, you can get it from the link on the announcement page on http://www.matroska.org/announce.html

2. Standalones/DVD players : dont forget, both SONY and Panasonic have announced to release DVD players that will be based on a form of Linux. If they make the basic firmware opensource, there are realistic chances to have a matroska standalone one day

3. the matroska name : yes, there was a kind of inspiration from the Russian dolls, whick spell 'matryoshka' normally. And yes, we have a nice number of possible logos for the project, to be seen here : http://corecodec.com/modules.php?op=modloa...viewtopic&t=292 : unfortunately, you will have to read all the 6 pages of this thread to see all of them, that is also to save Liisachan's bandwidth ( she has collected all of them on one site ) ...

I wonder why...

Really, Christian, were you happier when Iris was born, or when Matroska went beta?

will there eventually be an SV9? also, will there be confusion as to whether to encode audio archives using *.mpc vs. *.mka once SV8 has been completed and is implemented?

Iris is in hospital since about a week now, and the doctors had made a scary diagnosis at start, which unfortunately hasnt been proven to be true in the end ... believe me Roberto, there may have been times in the past weeks where i was thinking about the 'birth' of matroska intensively every day, but right now my thinking priorities have been corrected completely ... i just want my little baby girl back in our house, and healthy ....

New filter is out : http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&p...5391#post315391

How's your baby girl?

atici, actually Matroska must be "matreshka", a set of nesting dolls.
The funny thing is that word "matroska" is normally translated as "sailor's wife" or "sailor's jacket"

Thanks for asking ... Iris is much better, but i dont expect her to be home in the next 2 - 3 weeks.

(sorta "off-topic": ) all the best wishes..


(on-topic: ) anyone working on a matroska reader plugin for foobar2000 yet?

hmm if i remember right i think i read something about matroska being able to actually hold the needed codec in itself... is that true?

if not, is it possible to include this?

would be a brilliant function for porting and think about hardware-player possibilities! every new format would automatically be supported then...

How would you encode the codec? it's hardware dependent. I don't think you can encode the information for a decoder and even if you do it would take so much space it wouldn't be feasible.

I am sure there will be. But my comment was just a joke about the mentality that dreams of a better version all the time and thus never gets to use any because a new version will be out again soon.

New matroska DShow parser available from the Downloads page.

This new filter is adding

- CoreVorbis support
- Edit : Aspect Ratio correction is working from every DShow based player now, if latest FFDshow DivX/XviD decoder filter is used, dated 23rd May ( to enable it, activate the 'use overlay mixer' switch in the FFDshow codec setup page )
- DTS support ( untested ; muxing with either next VirtualdubMod or mkvmerger since 0.4.2 )
- Support for the new subtitles mediatypes, for working UTF8 subs playback in DVobSub ( Gabest is late, bug him to update it .. lol )

Important :

This new filter will be necessary to be able to play files created with next VirtualdubMod and mkvmerger release. The old filters may have difficulties recognizing the number of video/audio tracks correctly, with new files. Old files are still 100% supported and spec compliant, we just added a new EBML element to make handling of framerate easier for Cyrius and Mosu, and the old filters may have a problem with the new element.

Important 2 :

While this new filter works fine for one half of the team, its having problems for the 2nd half . We have no idea why, so dont delete you v0.4.2 installer yet ....

Gabest put the new vsfilter.dll online on his Guliverkli Project Page

So, finally, everybody making MKV files with UTF8 subs in VdubMod or mkvmerge can see them, and in correct UTF8 language ....

Bit unrelated, but what's up with sourceforge? It just keeps to throw me back to 'select mirror' page.
Had to 'construct' link manually.

sourceforge ? we are not using the file release system of sourceforge ?

You are not, but gabest is.
I meant his utf-8 aware version of vsfilter.

matroska can now have

SSA subtitles

muxed into it, thanks to Gabest. Read here