[xine-devel] Re: [xine-user] xine-lib CVS matroska demuxer experiences

[Thibaut M. <tma...@no...>]

Hi Ronald,

Ronald JJ van Caulil wrote:

>I've been waiting for Matroska (.mkv) support in Xine for some time now and I 
>was happy to find preliminary support in xine-lib CVS since the beginning of 
>this year. I did some testing with the new demuxer and this list seemed the 
>best place to post my experiences so far, in the hope that one of the 
>developers might stumble across it and find the information usefull (I could 
>have posted it to the devellopers list, but I found that a bit rude for 
>someone unable to write even the simplest 'hello world' in C :) 
>
>Software used:
>libmatroska 0.6.2
>  
>
not needed

>libebml 0.6.3
>  
>
not needed

>xine-lib CVS-19-01-2004 (latest change to demux_mkv.c: 17/01/2004, revision 
>1.14)
>  
>
the last one ;)

>xine-ui 0.9.23
>dist: gentoo ~x86
>
>what (almost) works:
>- most matroska files created with libmatroska=<0.6.1 I tried to play loaded 
>flawlesly (see further down for exceptions). files created with 
>libmatroska=0.6.2 took 5 seconds or more to load, but they did eventually 
>play just fine.
>  
>
That's because the whole file is parsed before starting to play. This 
limitation will go away when I will implement seeking.

>- all subtitle- and audio-streams were recognised, although the tags of the 
>first channel weren't read (e.g. 2 subtitle streams, say dutch=1 and 
>english=2, the dutch channel is listed as 'Channel 0', whereas the english 
>channel is properly read as 'Eng'; same goes for audio).
>  
>
Known issue, and easy to fix. "Eng" is the default value.

>- switching subtitle- and audio-streams on the fly using the gui worked 
>perfectly in all cases.
>  
>
cool ;-)

>- audio- and subtitle-delays are changeable on the fly (so seeking obviously 
>works there). Also, delays in audio- and subtitle-syncs using the option 
>'--sync 1:x' (e.g. --sync 1:500 to delay audio with 500 miliseconds) while 
>muxing the Matroska file, are properly interpreted by the demuxer.
>  
>
in fact there is no seeking involved here.

>- I've tested with the following codecs: xvid, divx, ogg, mp3 and with SRT 
>subtitles; these formats, at least, work just fine.
>
UTF8 is not supported yet.

> SSA subtitles do not 
>work, but I don't know wether Xine supports them in the first place. 
>  
>
mixing SRT and SSA subtitles in the same file is broken, I'm working on it.

>What doesn't work:
>- SSA subtitles (as noted above)
>  
>
Should be fixed soon. But don't expect a nice SSA/ASS support with 
color/fonts/...

>- seeking. already acknowledged and probably being worked on, but it would be 
>nice if this could be implemented quickly since it is really all the demuxer 
>needs to become acceptably usable imo.
>  
>
Should come after the subtitle support.

>- files that have been linked to previous ones don't play at all (for 
>information on file-linking in Matroska go to the bottom of the 'mkvmerge' 
>man-page). to give an example: of a 1.4Gb matroska file splitted into two 
>parts the 'default' way (which links the second file to the first one) the 
>first file will play perfectly appart from the problems noted above, but the 
>second one won't play at all; when the file has been splitted using the 
>'--dont-link' option, both files play fine. of files splitted into more than 
>2 parts using linking only the first resulting file plays.
>  
>
Don't know how linking works.

>- chapter skipping doesn't work (but neither does it when playing .ogm files), 
>but that's not a big problem
>  
>
low priority.

>- the TITLE-tag (track name of the video stream) isn't recognised by the gui, 
>nor are the chapter names. Then again, this should be very low priority.
>  
>
metadata are not supported yet.

>I hope this information will be useful for the further development of the 
>Matroska demuxer.
>
>  
>
Of course it's usefull. Many thanks for the report ;)

Cheers,
Thibaut