Hi Tobias : Official invitation to contribute to the MCF project ; [email protected] ;

To : Tobias Waldvogel
CC : BlackSun, Betaboy, MCF-devel


Hallo Tobias,

please allow me to take 10 minutes of your limited spare time to invite you to 
contribute to the MCF project, or better even to join the MCF team.

You know that i have been supporting your format implementation based on the Ogg 
container for a real long time, simply based on my belief that AVI has seen the end of 
its days and the community needs a new container format.

I was also fighting hard to convince the guys from Xiphoporus, mainly Monty and 
Emmett, to adopt your format implementation, or even parts of it, and also to make 
.ogm an 'official' extension for Ogg files. As of today i have to accept that all my 
constraints have been useless, Montys ideas about how to make theora in Ogg are 
showing that he seems to be not at all interested in taking pieces of your work, but 
instead he is completely reinventing the wheel. His latest plans are to

- drop VfW from VP3 completely and replace it with a Xiph specific codec handling 
API
- hack the Ogg framing by 'abusing' the granulepos value to mark keyframes
- not allow any using of existing VfW codecs in Ogg streams

Everybody knows i respect Monty and his work a lot, and one of the main reasons to 
even think about creating a new container replacing AVI was that i loved Vorbis ( i 
am talking about RC2, that time !! ) and couldn't stand MP3 anymore. But i have the 
feeling he is one of the best examples of a representant of the 'not-invented-here' 
syndrome, often found with Linux developers.

Why don't we support OGM and drop the creation of MCF you may ask ? Well, 
simply speaking we feel that our concept and framing is superior in a few respects, 
as the Ogg container was originally not designed having video streams in mind. An 
expert in video and audio application, Alex Stewart, wrote up a container comparison 
recently, you may find it here : http://www.foogod.com/~alex/ogg_analysis.html .

Another important aspect :

Blacksun mentioned to me recently that you plan to extend your work such that also 
non-VfW codecs could be used. This is one of the vital backbones of MCF, and also 
the reason why we were just recently capable of launching a first Dshow parser for it. 
Please check the MCF transor API to get an idea of what we were working on, 
mainly with the strong will to provide a codec handling API with MCF that allowed to 
use it on every other OS, not only Windows, and without hardcoding support for 
every single codec ( like Moritz Bunkus is doing for OGM now ).
Transor API : http://mcf.sourceforge.net/transor/transor-API.html

UCI :

The challenging task to create a new standard for a codec handling API within the 
MCF project was soo big that it almost killed the whole project. Fortunately we met 
Alex Stewart at that time, the creator of UCI ( http://uci.sourceforge.net ) . He 
launched UCI originally to create a common odec handling API for Unix platforms, 
but we convinced him that this work was necessary to be seen x-platform, and he 
was open enough to adapt the idea and now UCI stands for 'Universal Codec 
Interface' and is intended to become a x-platform standard for codec interaction. We 
plan to drop transor API almost completely now, and to use UCI for codec interaction 
from libmcf in future. This was giving the project a big push, plus that we got 
excellent input from Alex how to improve the MCF specs before freezing them soon.

Current project status of MCF :

Our To-Do list has the following points right now :

1. Freeze specs, as documented here : 
http://www.corecodec.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpBB2&file=viewforu
m&f=6 . robux4, our 'chief developer' , is currently making his way through 'docbooks'  
to be able to generate the specs in all wanted versions, like HTML, PDF, etc.

2. Implement UCI plus some minor extensions to handle not only codecs, but also 
other formats, from libmcf

3. Add video parsing to existing MCF Dshow filter/parser ( right now only audio )

4. Create a Dshow based muxer

5. Modify Vdub to allow MCF file creation and editing

6. Launch MCF authoring tool    '-gemma' for menue creation

The MCF development team comprises 4 full time and 3 part time members, plus a 
few consultants. The latter will read our mailing lists ( mostly through 
news://news.gmane.org , gmane.comp.video.mcf.devel ) and comment on some of 
our discussions.


Dear Tobias,

i know you have invested a lot of time into your Ogg format implementation, but may 
we ask you to consider joining a team instead of working on something similar fully 
on your own ? MCF is made from scratch, so we can tune the framing exactly the 
fulfill the needs of an audio/video container.

We would be glad to welcome you on irc.openprojects.net , #mcf at any time, to 
speak to you about our plans and goals.

Best regards

Christian
MCF Organizer and Administrator


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