Video containers are shit
Thursday, 8. October 2009 11:51 - daniel - Other - 2 Comments
This is going to be a rant, so skip it if you don't care.
Video playback is a pain in the ass. It's not just about codecs and players, but the video containers themselves are shit. I only had one container that has not caused problems yet. Everything else bugged sooner or later.
WMV regularly fails to resume video playback after pause in Media Player Classic. No idea why, but pause just doesn't work here.
MP4 caused some weird problems in mplayer, where the video length is all wrong and the audio and video go out of sync. No idea what's wrong with those shitty files, but I pretty much can't watch those files like this. And to make matters worse, mplayer is the only video player that has decent performance on Linux with Compiz running. The only way to fix these files was to remux them to MKV.
AVI files sometimes come without an index, requiring rebuilding of said index. I just don't get how a encoder can fuck up a video so much that it's unplayable on some players. And why doesn't anyone check before redistributing this files?
The only container I'm happy with is Matroska (MKV). The playback works in every player I use and I have yet to encounter shitty behaviour in any player.
Comments
Dankoozy - Sunday, 29. November 2009 18:33
I have had lots of problems with MKV. might be my particular version of vlc but playback is choppy
Daniel - Sunday, 29. November 2009 21:09
If your playback is choppy it might be the codecs fault and not the containers.