[Theora] Why do you use Theora?

[Monty]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2005 at 07:53:40PM +0100, Maik Merten wrote:
> > - Do you think, Ogg is an appropriate container-format for using with Theora? 
> > Wouldn't fit e.g. Matroska better?

I'll be a bit offtopic and mention (rather than answering the question)
that Ogg and Mastroska are for different uses.  

Ogg is a 'frozen stream' and nothing more.  It is linear by definition
and meant to be easy to 'thaw' into the original information either
for using directly, or for refashioning into other transports/formats.
It was always envisioned, for example, that an Icecast server could
break open a multiplexed Ogg stream on the fly, extract only the
pieces the client wanted, then 'freeze' it back into a new stream with
a trivial amount of CPU and less than a page of code.

Mastroska intends to be a higher-level non-linear packaging container.
The target is somewhat different (eg, complete DVD-like functionality
in a single file, including non-linear features).  

Although the feature and application sets overlap somewhat, the center
of each target is somewhat different.  Ogg intends to be as
simple/flexible a context-free stream transport as possible while
Mastroska intends to be more application-feature complete.

Monty