[Theora] OGG/OGM media container

[rcooley]

On Tue, 6 Jul 2004 02:43:41 -0700 (PDT)
Nilesh Bansal <bansal at cs.ubc.ca> wrote:

> What are main advantages/disadvantages of
> matroska(http://matroska.org/) over ogg/ogm? Why 2 different projects?
> Why not ditch one and concentrate on one?

Same reason there is Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and more.  Why
don't they all just concentrate on one?

[From a seperate e-mail]

> So xiph "officialy support" ogg and not ogm. But i am not able to find
> any tool to create ogg files. www.xiph.org provide no information
> about OGG either.

Vorbis files are all created in an ogg container.  "vorbis-tools"
includes libogg, which would be the library to create Ogg files.  Theora
also uses libogg to put video in an Ogg container.

If you are looking for a single stand-alone program, you'll find it in
CVS.  The ogmtools were based on "oggmerge", which has it's own
directory in Xiph.org CVS.  It doesn't support putting MPEG-4 video into
an Ogg file, or anything like that.  It basically supports putting
MNG video into an Ogg with Vorbis audio.

> Also, what is status of OGM? Is that stable and usable? If yes why
> mencoder etc, dont provide a option to produce a OGM instead of AVI.

Yes, it's stable and usable.  You will just have to ask the MPlayer
developers why they haven't added support for output to Ogm.  I would
say it's most likely because they didn't want to do all the work,
and they couldn't just link to an ogm library, singe ogmtools comes as a
standalone program. They implimented Matroska because there was a
library they could just link to (as they do with libavcodec, liba52,
etc).  There are other formats they rightfully could support (such as
the modified MOV container, for standards-compliant MPEG-4 video) but
they don't.  It's probably just lack of interest by those with the
skills to do it.