Curious about Matroska and mp4

andy

I've been using OGM containers for all of my DVD rips for a long time now (around 2 years, or so) and I'm curious about whether the MP4 container or Matroska container would be more viable solutions.

Thus far, the only complaints I have with OGM is that I am unable to play AAC/MP4 audio and that the Ogg Directshow subtitle filter is crap (forcing me to use the rather obnoxious Direct Vobsub).  Also, it seems that Ogg support has been rather dry for a long time.

That being said, I have noticed that matroska supports AAC and Haali's Filters seem more stable than the Ogg DS filters.  Beyond that, I don't know what Matroska could offer that Ogg cannot.

As for the mp4 container, I guess it will be sticking around for a while.  The amount of support it will be receiving is something to make me happy about, however, since I use Virtualdubmod exclusively for my video encoding, audio muxing and video editing, I'm a little wary about the extra steps I may need to take in order to create mp4 files.  I'm also a little wary about having to learn about a whole new program, since I know VirtualDubmod very well.  Also, beyond the potential greater stability and the ability to use AAC/m4a, I'm still not sure what benefit mp4 would give me over Ogm

As a whole, I'm rather happy with OGM, however, I'm not particularly happy with the lack of new OGM/Ogg filters coming out and the lack of support.  Can anyone shed some light on what potential benefits exist between the 3 containers?

Some good places you can see:
~noe/...containers.pdf
wiki/Compari...tainer_formats

I prefer Matroska because it is not abandoneded, still in development; its not a hack in ogg for suport MPEG 4 video, but a project to an universal container, with all features imaginables; it suports more video and audio formats; suports str, ssa, ass, usf and vobsub as subtitles formats and don't have any problem with unicode subtitles (in other words: you can have an japanese, an english and an portuguese subtitles in the same archieve w/out any problem). And of course it has by far less overehead. I also liked the project and it ideas as a whole.

Also the suport for matroska is better than for OGM nowadays. You have good tools from them (MKVToolnix, MKVinfo, etc) plus virtualdubmod, spliters that realy works w/out any bugs and their codec pack: Matroska Pack.

I had too much problems with ogg in the past, but for matroska only virtualdubmod have some problems with newer features. So matroska all the way, avi and probabily in future mp4 only for compatibiliy purpuses.

are you saying that OGM was abandoned?

Matroska has VFR and is actively developed. 2 mega points.

well, maybe abandoned is a too strong word... but not much work was put in ogm after 2002~2003 so I can say that the development is either very slow or almost stoped.


Originally Posted by movaxMatroska has VFR and is actively developed. 2 mega points.

What exactly is VFR?

VFR = Variable Frame Rate

OGM has suport for VFR audio (vorbis of course) but not for VFR video. The VFR audio suport was one of the main reasons for OGM development.

Some topics about OGM development:
showthread.php?t=96249
showthread.php?t=57217

I think it is all.

I will try to point out more advantages of Matroska and MP4 over OGM. One of them is the great Haali's Media Splitter. If you use chapters and/or more audio/subtitles tracks, your player probably won't support it. But this splitter will give you a possibility to select tracks and/or chapters from a tray icon. So you can use it with every DirectShow player.
Another big advantage over other containers is a tool called MKVToolnix from MOSU. It is a great program which will convert AVI, MP4, MPEG or RM into matroska. It has many useful futures.
The only 2 things I'm missing in matroska is the fact, that there is currently no menu support and that matroska doesen't support speex. I was also somplaining about missing MPC (Musepack) support. But I don't need it anymore since Vorbis already gives similar or better results.

Btw. matroska is also great for archiving audio CDs. You can make tracks as chapters, include an album art, lyrics or other attachments and have a whole album in one file.

VFR generally means putting 24 fps and 30 fps in the same video without hacking one into the other. mp4 also supports it, however there is no tool available to create them with it. I switched from ogm mostly because of tools like mkvtoolnix/mkvextract, and it gave me less problems than any of the three ogm splitters. At this point I doubt it'll ever be standalone supported any better than ogm was, so mp4 is definitely the way to go if you care about that in the near future, though its formats are a little more restrictive.

I think mkv can support menus, it's just not implemented in any of the creators, so it's manual labor++.

Yep, matroska has a excellent full set of tools for it, and a full set of video filters.Also, its VFR video support is quite useful, especially for anime, my area of speciality. No longer do people have to sacrifice the pans in a video by decimating the whole thing when outputting to AVI (well, the subbers still do), but my just marking off a no-dec rate and feeding the timecode to mkvmerge, all is good with the world.