Plans for a major matroska release

Hi Guys,

i am turning to you with the wish to try to coordinate a new PR event. 
As you may be aware, our container is still being considered as 
'unknown', 'unsupported' and 'experimental'. Only freaks, who understand 
the differences between the individual concepts, and anime/release 
freaks with a special interest in our advanced subtitles support 
consider actively using matroska for their movies today. It should be 
one of our major
 concerns to change this as soon as possible, with MP4 support getting 
better and better in some commercial apps already.

To change this i am planning a series of Public Announcements on most of 
the video/audio related forums, and also on some interesting mailing 
lists. I will also copy a number of PC magazines, especially those from 
Japan and Europe that were in contact with us, the TCMP or the VdubMod 
team already. Maybe we can even convince them to include one of our 
sample files and all the necessary tools on one of their distribution CDs.

The date for the announcement/release is planned to be end of next week 
now, say Friday 11th July. I would like to call this release 'Liisachan 
Release' , as she is one of the two Ladies we have in the team, and her 
great Guides and information pages about matroska are helping us a lot 
to get known in the anime scene, and their seem to be our biggest 
supporters for the time being. We could call the next release the 
'Marlena release' and finally select the offiicial matroska logo then ?

Here are the candidates for the release, that certainly could be 
considered an important and major release for us :

- libmatroska/libebml 0.5.0 ( robux4, Mosu ) : frame referencing system, 
time slices, tags reading/writing
    bugs : no known bugs ; wish-list : chapters

- mkvmerge 0.5.x ( Mosu, sysKin ) : RealVideo and RealAudio Muxing ( 
tested ), SSA subtitles muxing,  muxing support for native MPEG4 files
    bugs : no major known bugs, maybe SSA support is limited to certain 
UTF types or the parser code has problems with some of them
    wish list : splitting of native files and RV files ; converting AVI 
mode MVF files to native files ( using sysKin's MPEG4 frame parser )

- VirtualdubMod 1.5.4.x ( Cyrius, Belgabor ) : Editing of native MPEG4 
files ( including preview ), Editing of non-supported audio formats ( no 
ACM codec available, like AAC, DTS, RealAudio, etc. ),
    bugs : crashes when writing native files ( parsing/preview working ) 
; wish list : Aspect ratio tag writing, tagging support using latest lib

- TCMP RC4 ( Blacksun, Toff ) : Toff has audio stream switching working, 
with a nice trick ;-), and without using mmswitch.ax ; The bundle should 
come with latest mkxds.dll, CoreVorbis, and the CDL should be adapted 
for new tags
    bugs : uncountable :P ; someone pls. disable the EQ if multi-channel 
audio is used ( not AC3 ) , wish list : stability

- matroska splitter/muxer filter, DVobSub (Gabest ) : Support for RV 
muxing and playback, Aspect Ratio support with ffdshow
    bugs : none ; wish list : using of V_DSHOW/GUID for formats that are 
not using FourCCs/wFormat tags, but GUIDs

- avs2matroska ( DaveEL ) : creating native MPEG4 MKV files from 
Avisynth scripts, using xvid.dll, frames have correct order ( coding 
order ), no dummy frames used, FAST !!
    bugs : metaseek header is still b0rked AFAIK, not sure if CUE tables 
are writtin correctly : wish list : none i would be aware of :)

- rv2mkv ( Jcsston ), in 2 parts ;) : Transmuxing of RV files into 
matroska container
    bugs : no idea, you tell me, havent tested yet ; wish list : ?

- mkxds.dll 0.5.0 : support for native MPEG4 MKV files
    bugs : i tell you once its here : wish list : support for native 
MPEG4 MKV files with standard ffdshow, XviD decoder, DivX5 decoder, 3ivX 
decoder, so that native files play in any case

- Overhead DLL ( spyder ) : Allows precise overhead calculation for 
matroska files
    bugs : ? ; wish list : release of a working DLL :D ?


Sample files :

Together with this software release i think it would be appopriate to 
release some sample files also, to show what matroska can do :

 - Matrix Reloaded Trailer in 720 x 576 ( mf ) : Made with anamorphic AR 
from a 1000 x 540 QT source file, audio is Vorbis 5.1 ( from QT source 
), SRT subs are : english, finnish, japanese, spanish, portugese, 
slovenian, catalan, russian ; in preparation : maltesian, arabian

- Liisachan Trailer : as mf's trailer is roughly 2 minutes long and 
about 25 MB in size, i will ask Liisachan for a comparably small anime 
sample sniplet with about 5 - 8 MB, and preferably one or more SSA 
subtitles tracks.

Supported Player List :

In the announcement going out to the lists and forums i would also 
include a list of all the players that are supporting matroska now with 
special features

Please tel me what you think gilrls and guys. I expect a short answer at 
least from those whose software will be released, and from the sample 
providers.

Best regards

Christian





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