Matroska Multimedia Container Format

This was posted on the Controlled Vocabulary list that metadata expert, David Riecks manages.  Matroska is a new open standard container format for multimedia files.  Many readers will be aware of container formats for video, like QuickTime or AVI etc.  Matroska can be used to hold metadata, including ‘time line’ metadata such as DVD chapters:

• Fast seeking in the file
• Chapters
• Tags support
• Selectable subtitle/audio/video streams
• Error resilience (can recover playback even when the stream is damaged)
• Streams over the Internet and local networks, including HTTP, FTP and CIFS (file system)
• Menus

The other critical factor (for me anyway) was the LGPL licence:

“Matroska is an open standards project. This means for personal use it is absolutely free to use and that the technical specifications describing the bitstream are open to everybody, even to companies that would like to support it in their products. The source code of the libraries developed by the Matroska Development Team is licensed under GNU L-GPL. In addition to that, there are also free parsing and playback libraries available under the BSD license, for commercial software and Hardware adoption.” [Read More]

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