[SOFTWARE] : Open Audio/Video Container

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Πηγή : http://www.matroska.org
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Welcome to the Homepage of Matroska, the extensible open standard Audio/Video container. Matroska is usually found as .mkv files (matroska video) and .mka files (matroska audio).



Latest News :

The matroska playback packs have exceeded 3 Million downloads as of February 2006 ! As a matter of fact, matroska container gets a lot of support from its fans, especially in the anime scene, and first hardware standalone devices with direct matroska support are in the planning stage. For more information please have a look at our 'News Section' and check availability of the latest playback software for MKV files on our 'Downloads' pages !
If you absolutely insist to create a standard DVD out of your wonderful, lovely MKV files we recommend you to read this detailled Guide here , including screenshots on how to do it.

Matroska aims to become THE standard of multimedia container formats. It was derived from a project called MCF, but differentiates from it significantly because it is based on EBML (Extensible Binary Meta Language), a binary derivative of XML. EBML enables the Matroska Development Team to gain significant advantages in terms of future format extensibility, without breaking file support in old parsers.

First, it is essential to clarify exactly "What an Audio/Video container is", to avoid any misunderstandings:

* It is NOT a video or audio compression format (video codec)
* It is an envelope for which there can be many audio, video and subtitles streams, allowing the user to store a complete movie or CD in a single file.

Matroska is designed with the future in mind. It incorporates features you would expect from a modern container format, like:

* Fast seeking in the file
* High error recovery
* Chapter entries
* Selectable subtitle streams
* Selectable audio streams
* Modularly Extendable
* Streamable over internet (HTTP and RTP audio & video streams)
* Menus (like DVDs have)

Matroska is an open standards project. This means for personal use it is absolutely free to use and that the technical specifications describing the bitstream are open to everybody, even to companies that would like to support it in their products. The source code of the libraries developed by the Matroska Development Team is licensed under GNU L-GPL. In addition to that, there are also free parsing and playback libraries available under the BSD license, for commercial software adaption.

The founders of Matroska have the following goals:

* Create and document a modern, flexible and cross-platform Audio/Video container format, in combination with an open codec API to form a free and open media framework
* Establish Matroska as the opensource alternative to existing containers such as AVI, ASF, MOV, RM, MP4, MPG
* Develop a set of tools for the creation, editing and implementation of Matroska files
* Develop libraries and tools for software developers to be able to support Matroska in their applications
* Prepare hardware support of Matroska files in next generations standalone units, in close cooperation with device manufacturers
* Support adoption and implementation of Matroska's libraries into OpenBeOS Mediakit and GStreamer (Multimedia Framework for Linux , equivalent to Microsoft (TM) DirectShow (R) for Windows (TM))
* Launch a set of DirectShow filters for playback and creation of Matroska files on Windows (TM) Operating Systems

We invite every interested developer to join our team and to help us to achieve these goals. While most of the existing Matroska code is in C++ we are also interested in C and Java programmers joining us.

2006-07-14

After so many downloads (more than 4 millions total) of our pack for Windows, we have decided not to maintain it anymore and to invite users to use the CCCP pack which is better and constantly maintained. Our pack page now redirects users to the CCCP website.
2006-04-22

The success story about matroska continues, and it's developing fast ! More than 3 Million downloads for our container playback packs are showing pretty nicely, that demand is still growing and it's getting more and more used. The new video compression standard h.264 (AVC, MPEG 4 Part 10), available in the latest versions of widely used video compression programs such as NeroVisionExpress and allowing for incredible size/quality ratios, is actually one major reason for that :

The 'official' container for h.264 according to MPEG4 standard, a container format derived from Apple's MOV container with the name of MP4, does not offer official support for AC3 audio, the standard audio in DVDs ! It's only the flexible matroska container that currently allows to combine h.264 video streams with AC3 audio streams into a single file, and maybe even containing a vobsub (DVD style) or text subtitles stream with it. We also recently improved on support for those files having a varying number of frames per second, so-called VFR (Variable Framerate) video files, in our matroska tools. As this technique is used a lot in Japanese anime, the matroska container has more and more developed into being the standard container for anime fansubs ... and the industry is well aware of that !

Our menue system has been finalized some time ago, but unfortunately there is still no complete playback solution available for it. Best support is currently offered by the great VLC player from the French Videolan team, in its actual version 0.8.4. Besides buttons, most features of the matroska menue system are supported. A big disappointment to us was the fact, that the developers of ratDVD, other than stated before, never truely released the sourcecode of their DVD menue navigation DirectShow filter. In our opinion, this is clearly a conflict with the GPL license of the libdvdnav library (main Linux DVD menue library) they were using for it, but it's definitely not our job to clarify this. It seems that it will again be the Corecodec Inc. team with their great TCMP player who will be first to support the matroska menue system fully, we will see what they will come up with.

What else can we report :

- Our friends from Corecodec Inc. have released their fast h.264 DirectShow decoder filter CoreAVC for Windows Mediaplayer and other DirectShow based players. Unfortunately it can not be freeware, as they have to pay licenses to the MPEG Konsortium for every copy they distribute. It will allow for dramatic improvements with respect to the CPU load of your computer, when playing video material using h.264 video compression, about -20 - -30% compared to the already fast FFMPEG/ffdshow decoders.
The most important piece of software in the Corecodec community, besides matroska of course, is still the great TCPMP 'The Core Pocket Mediaplayer' for PocketPC, WinCE, PalmOS and Symbian devices .... needless to say, with excellent MKV and MKA support, allowing matroska playback on several million devices out there ! Its main developer, Picard, has recently put a beta version of a Windows Desktop version for Windows 2000/XP online, probably being the one mediaplayer using the least CPU resources, in case you want to use an older PC or laptop for media playback ... just try it out !

- the people from the Australian DVD player manufacturer Zensonic are still eager to be the first hardware player with matroska it seems, aiming to add basic MKV support to their brand new Z500 unit, a DVD/DivX/MP4 player based on the SIGMA EM85xx chipset. We again offered both free code and help to them, should they really want to start looking at that. Technically it should be possible to get at least the main MPEG4 ASP codecs (DivX, XviD) to play fine from MKV, in combination with AAC, AC3, Vorbis or MP3 audio, and SRT/SSA subs. The unit is currently not available in Europe, but we heard that it can be bought in the US now via internet and that official import for both US, Europe and Asia is planned before the end of the year ..... maybe then already including basic MKV support, we will see ! Rest assured, we will keep you updated !

- The well known audio player Foobar2000 went from version 0.8.3 to 0.9 recently, with major changes to the internal player architecture and plugin interfaces. We are more than happy, that a friendly japanese coder and matroska user by the nickname 'Ayana' has updated the existing matroska plugin to comply with the new interface of the 0.9 version of the player. It's not in the official installer of the player yet, you will find it here. Note that it will ONLY work with the new 0.9 version !
Foobar2000, although being a dedicated audio player, is enjoying a growing popularity even amogst video compression fans, because its not only a player but also a great audio conversion tool, e.g. to go from AC3 to MP3 or Vorbis audio.

- Avi-MUX GUI, the great AVI and MKV muxing tool from our friend and long time German supporter Alexander 'alexnoe' Noe, is now available in a new version, 1.17.5 . Besides many other improvements, his tool has now great support to create and edit 'editions' in a MKV file, a kind of very powerful chapters, allowing to define how a file is going to be played.
For example, with it you can easily create chapter entries in different languages, storing each of them in the same or a different edition, and the great Haali Mediasplitter (coming with our DirectShow playback packs) will then automatically display the chapters in the main language (locale) of the given playback computer.

- In case you should not like our new container format at all, or if you prefer to watch movies on your standalone DVD player in your living room, there are now 3 new options for you to convert your MKV files into other formats :
1. We uploaded a detailled Guide with screenshots on our homepage, showing how to easily convert most MKV files to DVDs, and to burn them in the same app, using DVD Santa 4.0 (payware). Unfortunately this method will still not work for those MKVs containing HD-TV captures in a picture resolution higher than DVDs (rare), or containing audio streams with more than 2 channels (Stereo), like the widely used 5.1 HE-AAC audio files created by Nero and other good AAC compressors.
Generally speaking we are pretty frustrated that the DVD Santa developers are still refusing to talk to us, for whatever reason. Maybe you, their potential customers, can make a change here ? Our Guide will contain a section at the end of it, telling you how to bother them for better MKV support in their tool.
2. One of the few remaining, harsh MKV enemies amongst the video developers (just read his comments on his homepage) has launched a nice tool called AllToAvi, allowing for pretty simple conversion of MKV files into conventional XviD/MP3 AVIs, of course in a pretty time consuming process and with the expected loss of quality/size ratio. Its based on Linux' famous mencoder and will of course hardburn the subtitles into the video stream, just right for the Sigma and Mediatek based DivX AVI players out there.
3. A more versatile tool, also based on mencoder and allowing to do basically the same and much more, is a new encoder called Mediacoder. As its more powerful then the above mentioned one, its also a bit more complicated to use. Big advantage is, it will work both ways, means it will read MKV files and allow converting them to DVD or AVI, but you can also CREATE MKV files from other files, like DVDs, and even using the brand new h.264 compression standard (using x264 from Videolan) ! I hope that soon i will have more time to work myself into it, and be able to make a nice Guide on how to use it, both ways.

That's it for the time being, sorry about the long wait for the update. I hope it will not take another 6 months for us to make a new news entry here, but we're all just human beings, aren't we ;-) ....