Re: Several (minor) issues or underspecified areas in the MKV spec

On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 12:07 AM, Steve Lhomme <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 28/10/2015 01:14, Michael Bradshaw wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 1:10 AM, Steve Lhomme <[email protected]
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>
>>     ...
>>
>>
>> Some follow up questions:
>>
>>  1. If the DocType spec (e.g. the MKV spec or WebM spec) doesn't define
>>     a default value for an optional element, and that element is encoded
>>     with a zero length, does its default value fall back to the EBML
>>     spec (so it would be 0 for int/float types)?
>>
>
> If the element doesn't have a default value it should not be encoded with
> zero length. This is considered invalid. At least that's how it's currently
> supposed to be handled.
>
> In real life libebml with use a value of zero. And I think it should be
> that way from now on. That allows a cheap way to save space in most cases.
>

And what about a mandatory element that's encoded with zero length? I
assume they would work the same as optional elements: if a mandatory
element has a zero length then its value is its default.

 3. BlockDuration's description is kinda confusing. Specifically the
>>     following sentence: "When not written and with no DefaultDuration,
>>     the value is assumed to be the difference between the timestamp of
>>     this Block and the timestamp of the next Block in "display" order
>>     (not coding order)." If BlockDuration is not written, and there is
>>     no DefaultDuration (thus it's not mandatory), I'm not sure it makes
>>     sense to talk about its value and make assumptions about it. If it's
>>
>
> You're right.
>
>     not written it doesn't exist and can't have a value. I'm guessing
>>     the sentence is trying to talk about how users can compute the
>>     duration of the block, in which case I might suggest replacing "the
>>     value is assumed to be" with "the duration of the block is". I think
>>     this helps separate the distinction between the literal element
>>     itself and the semantic value it's attempting to represent (the
>>     BlockDuration element may not exist, but the semantic value it
>>     represents (the block's duration) still does (philosophically
>>     speaking) and can be computed).
>>
>
> I'd rather completely remove it. In the end you may have video with B
> frames (not in WebM) which timestamp order is not always growing. So you
> cannot even try to find the duration of the Block/frames that way. If you
> don't have the value, then you don't have it. That's all.


Revmoving that text sounds reasonable to me.

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