Important project update for matroska, the 'CHIP release' is out !

[ChristianHJW]

Hi,

please allow me to announce a very big and also important step for the matroska openstandard/ opensource container project matroska. As there is an article planned about our project in the big German PC magazine 'CHIP' ( to come out beginning of September ) and we had to hand our software over to them today, 4th august, we take the opportunity to release all the software that was being developed for this release here :

This release makes a long list of additonal features in matroska files possible, such as

- chapters
- matroska tags
- attachement files
- CRC32 EDC elements
- file splitting with indexing
- RV9 video in MKV ( Realmedia )
- RA audio in MKV ( RealAudio )
- SSA/ASS subtitles muxing into MKV files


The released tools/programs are :

1. libmatroska/libebml 0.5.0 : the latest basic libraries, necessary for programmers who are planning to support matroska in their tools, or for Linux users who want to compile latest mplayer from CVS against the very latest library version. They can be downloaded from the official download page, direct links are here and here

2. VirtualdubMod 1.5.4 : This version is not only fixing a couple of minor bugs, its also adding a couple of very important new features such as
- chapter writing support
- basic tagging support
- writing of CRC32 EDC elements
- editing of non VCM-codec video streams, such as RealVide 9 ( only CFR ) and 'native' MPEG4 ISO MKV files ( to come soon )
Get it from the usual project page

3. MKVtoolnix 0.6.0 : Compiled against latest library, Mosu's package offers the following new features :
- file splitting
- chapter file import and chapter writing
- RealVideo ( rv 10, 20, 30, 40 = RV9 ) and RealAudio muxing ( Cook, ATRAC, RALF, SIPRO, etc. )
- SSA subtitle muxing, only UTF8 ( no UTF16 yet )
- CRC32
Its for download at the usual MKVtoolnix homepage, including win32 binaries based on mingw .

4. New matroska playback pack for Windows : It does include
- Gabest' latest matroskasplitter filter, with chapter support via COM ( only certain player like MPC and TCMP RC4 will suupport that for now )
- CoreVorbis
- Timestamp manager from DaveEL ( for native MPEG4 ISO MKV files, to come soon )
- MatrixMixer filter
- Gabest' latest matroskamuxer filter, for file creation on DShow ( optional )
- Gabest' subtitle playback filter DVobSub 2.27 ( optional )
- Gabest' subtitle source filter, for SSA muxing ( optional )
- Gabest' Realmedia splitter/wrapper filters ( optional )
Get the latest version always from the official matroska download page on http://www.matroska.org

5. TCMP RC4 ( The Core Media Player ) with matroska CDL 1.3 :
The team around Blacksun and Toff have greatly improved the player in many details, highlights are
- a new media library
- many many bug fixes
- new skins
- new matroska CDL ( by jcsston ) with matroska tags reading/writing from the player
- new CDL API
- chapter support for matroska
etc.
Get it from the official homepage

6. MPC 6.4.5.9 : This player has found a lot of friends in very short time, it doesnt offer a lot of fancy stuff like various skins or the like, but is working rock solid and with a very good performance, as its coded in C++ . Latest version has improved Realmedia and matroska support, both with included parsers. Additional features to previous versions are
- chapter support in MKV
- RealVideo playback from MKV
- Subtitle syncing from the player
- Capturing into MKV ( from WDM drivers )
From the Guliverkli page

7. Matroska Shell extension v 1.3 : Jory 'jcsston' Stone created this great Windows tool, after installation it will tell you anything you want to know about your files, and even allow you to read/write all existing matroska tags, or to change the display size of a file. Get it here

8. mmg : A new developer and a new tool for the project, Florian 'SirElvis' Wagner created an excellent GUI for Mosu's mkvmerge win32 binaries, so that those users who dont like CLI programs too much can use it very comfortably. There are 2 versions of it, one with an installer that is including mkvtoolnix 0.6.0, and one without ( just the GUI ).

9. Gabest's RealMedia splitter filter : The wizzard programmer and well known author of 'VobSub' took the challenge and created a DirectShow Realmedia splitter filter, as well as some wrapper filter around the Real DLLs, so that playback of Realmedia Files on every DirectShow player is possible. This is the basis of a working 'Realmedia from MKV' playback, as before these filters existed it was impossible to call the REAL DLLs from any matroska parser/splitter filter. They need the 'RealOne' player to be installed on the same PC, as only then the DLLs will be existent to be called from the wrapper filters. Also from the Guliverkli page.

10. VirtualVCR_matroska : A modification to this well known DirectShow based capturing application, using matroskamuxer.ax to capture any content from a WDM capture card into MKV files. To be downloaded here.

11. VLC : the videolan guys have added matroska playback support to their great player, based on 0.4.4 version of the library, so it will play all matroska files fine, but not be able to use tags or chapters in the files. The player is available for Linux, Win32, MaxOSX and BeOS and can be obtained from the Videolan Homepage.

12. Gstreamer-Plugin : Ronald 'BBB' Bultje, the Gstreamer developer, has not only made a closed source implementation for the company he works for, so that they can capture video material into MKV files, but also created an opensource Gstreamer playback plugin, find it on http://www.gstreamer.net .

13. Dark-Cracker has made a DirectShow based muxing GUI for Gabest's matroskamuxer filter, its very convenient to handle and currently the easiest way to mux SSA or ASS subtitles into MKV files, until Mosu can add UTF 16 SSA compatibility to mkvmerge.


Other matroska releated news :

The team around koepi has now added matroska creation to their DirectShow based file muxing tool OggMuxer .

Matroska has now a feature list to be found here , the intention behind is to keep people informed about what we are actually working on, and what is to come next.

With this release there also a number of sample files to be released, which you can load soon from the samples page on http://matroska.free.fr/samples/index.html

Sorry for the long email, but as you can see there was a lot to report. We hope you can see from this release that everybody in the team is working really hard to make matroska one of the best, if not THE best, openstandard audio/video container format.

ChristianHJW

[ChristianHJW]

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT !!!!

DONT USE HE-AAC IN MKV FILES UNTIL WE COULD UPDATE THE TOOLS !!!!


It was decided today that, different to first opinions, it will be necessary to tag HE-AAC audio tracks in matroska files separately. This became necessary due to a specific 'feature' of M$ DirectShow, still the most used playback platform for all kinds of media files, but mainly for video files.

DirectShow requires that the actual output sampling rate of an audio track is known before building/creating the playback graph. Unfortunately, a HE-AAC ( AAC SBR ) track is marked as half sampling rate only, to allow playback on non-SBR capable decoders/players. The track will be played, but with high frequency information being completey cut off, as the SBR info in the track will be skipped.

For DirectShow playback of matroska files this is giving us a lot of problems, because you actually learn if an AAC track is SBR or not, once you have decoded the first channel element ( IIRC from what menno told us ). This is impossible to do before you have actually built the playback graph, and then with an already incorrect sampling rate, preventing you from using the high frequency sound information. A possible workaround here is to assume all AAC is HE-AAC, and to set output sampling rate from the parser filter always by factor 2 higher ( if its set as 22.050 KHz, you output 44.1 KHz ). Once you decoded the first element, and you find its NOT SBR AAC, you then have to artificially upsample the output sampling rate. While this is a good solution at first sight, it will turn into a major problem if in future 96 KHz input was feed into HE AAC encoders, resulting in a 48 KHz sampling rate reported in the AAC header. In this case you will also have to double the sampling rate always, up to 96 KHz, and thus leave the files unplayable on most systems when soundcards dont support this input sampling rates, or again all the SBR information was lost during playback.

For this reason, we decided to NOT follow menno's recommendation for using the same codec ID for all AAC tracks, and leave SBR detection to the decoder, but now we will try to find out for every track if it actually contains SBR or not. To indicate in the MKV file that AAC is SBR, we will add a new EBML element called KaxOutputSamplingRate , and this will become a mandatory element to read before building DirectShow graphs ( it can be used the very same with MP3Pro and other, future SBR implementations ). To find out about SBR we have 2 ways :

1. If AAC is coming from MP4 container, its easy, as there are 5 bytes in the mp4 AudioSpecificConfig element that will tell us

2. If source is an AAC track, we will allow the user to set the HE AAC flag manually, or scan the file for SBR specific patterns in the bitstream

Conclusion :

There will be a new way to use HE-AAC in matroska, please dont create those files with released tools now !