Better Media Container Formats?

altaic asks: "Today I was looking for a container format to store my anime collection (multi-language audio and subs), and I discovered popular media containers actually suck. AVIs are a hacked mess and don't even support multiple audio tracks. OGMs are catching on, but they don't have an index, nor do they support variable framerates (the fps value is stored in the header). I found some info on the Matroska container, which looks really cool (it supports multiple subtitle streams, multiple audio streams, a slew of other nice features), as well as the very young MPCF (mplayer container format). I'd really like to hear about other people's experiences with newer, more useful media containers."

MPCF = MPlayer Container Format

[mikecheng]

I followed the discussion of a "better" universal a/v container format with interest in Feb/Mar 2003 on the mplayer mailing list.

It was first raised in Feb2003 here [mplayerhq.hu].

The conversation died for a while, and then it was brought up again [mplayerhq.hu] in March. (Although the conversation seemed to get bogged down on selecting a name for the format).

The format description [mplayerhq.hu] is now included in the DOCS/tech directory of the mplayer tarball. Not sure whether any of it's actually implemented in the mplayer code.

AVI does support multiple audio tracks

[reynaert]

It may be that most media players can't deal with it, but the AVI format certainly supports multiple audio tracks, and it always has, as Google confirms [google.be]. BTW, have you looked at MOV (QuickTime)? It's better than AVI, and it is better known than the other formats you list.

Re:Quicktime.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, mov container supports more features than I was aware of. As a guess for why people don't use it more - lack of free, easy to use muxing utilites. I'm not aware of any, if you can link to any for windows or linux platform it'd be nice. As an example of why I like matroska - last week I took an HDTV transport stream, demuxed the video and audio parts, resized and reencoded the mpeg2 video into xvid (didn't feel the need to store 18mbps mpeg2 video that was at a res bigger than my monitor -_-), left the aac audio untouched, made a quick sub script for it, and then muxed it all together into a matroska file with proper audio pre-delay. All fairly easy to do with free video tools I'm already familiar with. If there's tools out there to allow making a mov file with all the same features and an easier to use interface, great ^^