Post
by Zero1 » Sun Jan 07, 2007 10:30 pm
Give it a year or two (less if people would use MP4 on a more regular basis), and dealing with H.264 in MP4 will be as easy (or almost as easy) as dealing with MPEG-1 in MPG. It is after all, this generations rendition of the winning format, updated with all the features you know and love.
MPEG exist due to the desire of interoperability. If it wasn't for these guys, we'd be stuck with WMV, RM and MOV believe me. But interoperability doesn't come over night. The standards cost money, and people won't implement them if there is no call for it. For there to be call for it, we need to start encoding, distributing and downloading H.264 in MP4. Companies aren't blind or stupid, they know that stuff is being torrented, shared and downloaded and what formats are hot.
A prime example of this is ADV. A few months ago they started creating little packs of extras. Video extras would be MPEG-4 ASP & MP3 in AVI (as you might imagine, they used XviD and LAME), there were also wallpapers and such, and they distributed them via BitTorrent, a far cry from low res embedded WMV.
Another example is MP3. The first software encoder to output .mp3 files came out in 1995 by the Fraunhofer group (it had encoded mp3 files before this, but they were known by the .bit extension). Like anything it didn't become popular overnight, it took a few years for it to become "mainstream" and still continues to become more so.
This can perhaps be attributed to the assistance of the internet. Sharing and downloading; suddenly this thing known as mp3 gives you access to "free" music at reasonable filesizes. The next major thing to happen for mp3 was press coverage. Parent's were being sued because their kids were downloading mp3, people were whining about copyright, Napster etc; so now it's in the national newspapers, presented in a format where you don't need to be tech savvy to learn what it is.
This creates a certain amount of hype and people want to get in on the act, so begins the vicious cycle, more people start creating mp3s and more people start downloading them.
Now there is a market. You have millions of people creating, sharing and downloading mp3, but other than a computer or burning to audio CD, no convienient way of playing them. Enter mp3 players; one of man's greatest inventions. Now you as a company have a reason to get that license from MPEG. We now have CD players that play MP3 burned to a disc, and likewise DVD players; and just go and find me a media player worth it's salt that doesn't support mp3. This all stems from the fact that home users are using this standard to begin with. Companies latch on later when they see there is significant demand.
MP3 pretty much had the monopoly on compressed music, so it got a foot hold and that's part of the reason it's where it is today. What would have happened if Vorbis was around at roughly the same time? It could have slowed down the take on rate which is a shame because it's unlikely Vorbis will ever be where MP3 is, so it's like you are slowing the adoption of MP3 for a standard/codec that isn't really going to go anywhere. It should also be noted that Vorbis was probably wider used a few years ago than AAC, but AAC has now pretty much eclipsed Vorbis. You may attribute that in part to iPod, but AAC also gets a good deal of usage in video, and has much better 5.1 coding than Vorbis. Again with the interoperability, there are many more players and software that supports AAC in MP4 compared to Vorbis, so at this moment in time I would feel confident that if I sent AAC to someone, that some way they would be able to play it. I wouldn't be so confident with Vorbis though.
Even though there are better standards and codecs today, MP3 is so widely used and available that it has become just "good enough". This happens in other areas too, such as still images (JPEG2000 is way better than JPEG), and softsubs. People are content with .ass softsubs so no one can be bothered to code good .ttxt (MP4/3GPP timed text) support. If this subtitle support was a little better, it would assist MP4 a little. Obviously Joe Average doesn't give a hoot about subtitles, for a native language DVD, he wouldn't bother to OCR the subs and softsub it. However in fansubbing softsubs are becoming a big deal, and because no one can be bothered to code good support for MP4 softsubs, people use MKV, which is of course less people using MP4 (again this slows down the adoption rate).
Similarly; look at "DivX players". MPEG-4 ASP in AVI is in no way standard, but companies are willing to create hardware players based on hacks simply because there is demand. During 2001-2005, the fansub scene was almost exclusively MPEG-4 ASP in AVI, and before that, MPEG-4 SP in AVI (same family, and as such SP is decodable by ASP capable decoders).
This is my reason for promoting MP4 over MKV; it's not that I dislike MKV (I respect the work of the team, creating your own container isn't exactly simple), it's that I value interoperability. I like to be able to think that I can send a H.264 video in MP4 to someone and it will work for them regardless whether they are on Windows, Mac or Linux (CPU permitting). Of course player support is a factor, but let's face it, Quicktime for example, is a hell of a lot more likely to support my H.264 in MP4 encodes than someone elses H.264 in MKV (even if it is just a matter of time until Apple includes high profile decoding). The other thing is that computers bundled with software like Nero Burning ROM have MP4 playback off the bat; that's great for newbies that don't know about codecs (and there are a lot of people that fall into that category, we tend to not appreciate this because we are constantly taking with people who have similar interests).
There are two main factors to blame for MP4 support not being better, be it array of tools or level of interoperability. This is not to be interpreted as "MP4 support is bad", on the contrary it's much better than many formats; what I mean by not being better, is that this level of support should have existed around 3 or 4 years ago; and think where MP4 will be 3 or 4 years from now. A lot of progress can be made in that time.
The two factors I'm talking about are DivX and MKV, but I consider MKV to be an innocent bystander doing it's job, so hold fire before you jump at me, all will be explained.
As I touched on earlier, DivX is a sore subject for me, I have a lot of animosity for what DivX had done in the past; and having said that, I remember that they continue to do it, with little success. For those of you who didn't take Encoding History as a subject at school, I shall recap.
It started out rather "innocently". Microsoft had their own MPEG-4 encoder (thought to be non-spec MPEG-4 SP) which was for use in the .asf container. A guy called Gej hacked the codec to allow .avi. This wasn't so bad, you see there's nothing particularly "ugly" about MPEG-4 SP in AVI since it doesn't make use of B-frames (they are a feature of ASP); in fact I would quite openly admit that I think that was a good move. I would much rather use DivX 3.11 in AVI than MS MPEG4 in ASF.
It turned nasty in 2002, with DivX 5.0. That's when they took a step up and decided to include ASP features such as B-frames; and as you all should know, B-frames in AVI is bad news. At this point, DivX should have started using MP4, since AVI was now officially outdated as it is unable to handle the streams without hacks. Unfortunately they already had a large userbase, and switching to MP4 for their next release would have caused a major upset, so what did they do? The stuck with AVI, but developed the hacks for B-frames. From their perspective this was the right thing to do. For the end user, these hacks are pretty much transparent, but in actual fact, what they had done would stunt industry growth for many years.
Version upon version was released, still using AVI; same with XviD. It had become the defacto standard, most people didn't know any better. Those that did couldn't do anything about it, there was a distinct lack of information and support for MP4 around 2002, so people just got on with it.
How do they still continue to make a mess of things? Well not only do they still support AVI 4 or 5 years later, they also "created" their own container format called .divx. I had written created in quotation marks because they didn't create shit. .DIVX is simply .AVI renamed and dual audio/menus hacked in. This is again detrimental to MP4, because they are simply hacking AVI into a poor mans MP4, so Joe Average sees no reason to switch. Thankfully though, the .DIVX format has pretty much bombed, no one except complete newbies use it, and those that know better use MPEG-4 ASP (XviD) in MP4, or in second place MPEG-4 ASP (XviD) in AVI.
So basically, MP4 support is 4 years late because people were content using AVI, and didn't realise that it was non standard and hacky. Also tools were not readily available as a result of this. Fortunately, H.264 has been seen as a fresh start, people are now encoding ISO spec streams in modern containers. Also it means a chance to get back on track with interoperability and standalone players. Stand alone players became somewhat a joke with their half assed implementations, but perhaps if people had done things to specification to begin with, some reputable companies would have made MP4/ASP players that actually work
Now we move on to MKV. So how and why do I think MKV affects MP4 and interoperability, and why do I call it an innocent bystander, isn't that kind of contradictory?
Well it's the supply and demand deal. Fortunately in the real world and in the AMV world, MP4 rules the roost, so there is perhaps not so much to worry about, but at least in fansubbing, someone using MKV is someone who isn't using MP4. Lets try to illustrate what I'm getting at.
Say you have a company designing a hardware player, or it could even be a company developing their own media player (like Quicktime); obviously there will be R&D; and I don't know how this is carried out, but for arguments sake let's say they take a survey of 1000 videos. You might find that there are 400 AVI, 200 MP4 and 400 MKV. Now as I mentioned, companies tend not to want to touch MKV (or non ISO standards in general) with a barge pole. They might conclude from this that AVI is still the most popular with 400 files vs MP4 with 200 files.
Now in an ideal world, if all those who were using MKV used MP4 (for example MKV never existed), then you may have seen some very different numbers. It could now look like 400 AVI, 600 MP4, so now all of a sudden you have your demand for the companies to make players or software for.
I say MKV is like an innocent bystander because it hasn't done anything directly detrimental to MP4, it's simply another container and some people choose it over MP4, as opposed to DivX on the other hand who hack old standards which screws things up, just because they didn't do the job right in the beginning.
MKV isn't even in direct competition to MP4 in my opinion, MKV is more of a replacement for AVI and MP4 is a replacement for MPG. Despite DivX and MKV stunting MP4's growth and take on rate (and in turn interoperability), it still battles on and is at a pretty damn good level. Good enough to use everyday. MP4box has full menu muxing abilities and a couple of players support these menus too. MP4 is already supported in more hardware and software than MKV. MP4box is great, offers everything you need and has simple command lines (plus there is a great GUI for it too
I've had the same amount of problems with MP4 as I've had with AVI, which might be 1 or 2 in 3 years. That isn't bad going. However despite being a competant encoder, I cannot say the same for MKV. I've found some that play strange (even using FFDShow/Haali or CCCP), and a few old ones with LTP-AAC that cause instadeath to any player. You see as great as MKV is, it's under constant development and is subject to change.
Just recently the CodecID for AAC was changed and I've already seen some issue relating to that on the CCCP forum. The MP4 spec is complete and well documented, the only problems you will tend to find are coding errors by whoever implements it, unlike MKV where an oversight or design flaw could cause an issue.
Basically if we want to see stand alone players, better file support in portable playes, better software support and better "editing" tools, we need to start making, distributing and downloading more MP4 to show these bigshots (and open source devs) that there is call for it. For example I encoded some lossless audio with MPEG-4 ALS, but who is going to write a decoder if they don't know people (or think they aren't) are using it
