[gst-devel] Project Announcement : New Media Container Format 'matroska'

[ChristianHJW <chr...@us...>]

Please allow me to announce the creation of a new open source Media
Container Format, named 'matroska'

Project page is here http://sf.net/projects/matroska ; homepage is
http://matroska.sourceforge.net , HTML should be online soon.

Steve 'robux4' LHomme and myself have left the MCF project because of
incompatibilities of our work with the project goals defined by the founder
of MCF ( TMF ), Lasse 'Tronic' Karkainen, especially with respect to the
latest specs Steve had been writing and documenting here
http://matroska.sourceforge.net/specs/ ( replace libmcf with libmatroska,
will be updated soon ) .

Tronic himself could not be actively participating on the project lately,
due to the fact that his courses at university didnt leave him much time to
do so. Steve and myself have been developing the project further, and now we
find ourselves in the situation that the result of this work does not comply
with the goals the original project leader was defining for it. As a
consequence we decided to leave MCF and found our own project.

matroska will of course be based on MCF, but the EBML based specs that were
developed together with Frank Klemm ( main MPC developer ) make the format
very extensible on the one hand, but harder to parse on the other hand.
Steve and myself do believe that easiness of parsing is a minor thing today,
with respect to the fast development of modern CPUs, but extensability has
proven to be a steady issue for container formats, as nobody can predict
what future requirements may be.

EBML, being a kind of binary equivalent to XML, can be supported on all
platforms easily and we hope that by using it we can differentiate our
project from other known containers significantly.

I am personally not happy about the fact that we had to found a new project,
but it seems that it was the only alternative now. Of course we are well
aware of the fact that both projects will become weaker this way, but we
hope to be able to release the container including creation tools and
playback filters until January/February 2003, and then the users will decide
what format they prefer.

About the project name : we needed one quickly and amongst the numerous
trials to find a 'friendly name' for MCF matroska seemd to be the best one.
As it was Frank's idea and we knew he wouldnt mind we went for it, but
please be aware we will listen closely to your considerations in this
respect, as nothing has to be made in concrete yet.

Thanks for your interest


ChristianHJW
matroska project administrator