Lair Of The Multimedia Guru

2007-05-22

storing xiph codecs in containers other than ogg

Storing vorbis, theora and all the other xiph codecs in containers other than ogg is in principle not difficult, the primary problem is just that xiph codecs have several global headers while most generic containers expect just 1 or no global header. Mapping from several (3 normally) to 1 can be done in many ways and as there is no official recommandition from xiph which says how to do this, people have come up with various incompatible solution. Furthermore people have done other insane things like storing vorbis in ogg and that in avi and similar very very broken things …

So a long time ago ive decided to write a proposal for a recommandition on how to store xiph codecs in containers other than ogg, sadly it has been mostly ignored at the time of its writing

But yesterday someone from xiph contacted me and alex and asked if we where interrested to work on this oggless recommandition :) which lead to The oggless wiki page and a posting on ogg-dev so if you want to contribute to this / disscuss it (on ogg-dev), now is the right time …

Filed under: Container Formats,FFmpeg — Michael @ 21:32

4 Comments »

  1. Sounds like a great initiative. I wonder about doing the same with Dirac now?

    Comment by Mike Melanson — 2007-05-23 @ 05:43

  2. I dont see anything which would need to be done with dirac. to quote their FAQ
    “We intend to pack the Dirac elementary stream into MXF, which has lots of useful features. That doesn’t preclude it packing into Ogg (or Matroska, or anything else) as well, and it’s probably a good idea to have a variety of packing formats. For this the elementary stream needs to be very well defined.”

    so unless you suggest that we should convince them not to use MXF as primarely recommanded container, i dont see anything to do here. unless you know of some problem with puting dirac in non mxf containers?

    Comment by Michael — 2007-05-23 @ 17:03

  3. Obviously, I haven’t really kept up. The last time I was engaged with Dirac, I put forth the idea of defining a spec to encapsulate Dirac in non-Dirac containers. But I seem to recall the creators shrugged this off with a sort of “Why would you want to do that?” response. That wsa some time ago.

    Comment by Mike Melanson — 2007-05-24 @ 15:20

  4. Theora stands a chcnae as a bread-and-butter codec for low- to mid-quality internet streaming. Honestly, who cares whether a quickly consumed and instantly forgotten video feed is top-notch quality.For archieval puposes Theora is simply so much outperformed by other codecs that nobody should really be using it. H.264 plays in a different league. Honestly, would you use Linux if it ran slow, crashed, didn’t have multitasking? No, me neither.If we are looking for a competitive codec we shouldn’t be looking elsewhere VP8 might be good, the BBC’s open-source Dirac’-codec might be better.

    Comment by Robert — 2015-12-23 @ 19:06

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