I put the Who? in Mishehu wrote: > I'm not sure who caught sight of the article that was posted to slashdot > a few days ago about that Handbrake project dropping DiVX/Xvid and/or > the AVI container format altogether. There were a lot of comments about > how AVI is an obsolete container format and has all sorts of issues with > audio and visual sync, how it causes programmers endless headaches, how > it doesn't support chapters and subtitles, etc. As far as transcode > users are concerned, what are the preferred container formats for > generic audio/video content these days then? OGM? MKV? I have up to > this point been transcoding my mpeg2ts to xvid in an avi container... > perhaps I should use something a little more modern?
mkv is the way to go, but I have a comment too: Some of the "problems" with avi are actually benefits in some cases. When a newbie starts transcoding, and makes use of some magic bullet like dvd:rip or Handbrake, if he manages to create a DIVX5 compatible avi container his output will probably be tractable to most viewers and re-encoders. If he manages to make a mkv with vfr, dropped frames, a bogus codec, and unordered chapters, he may create something that is viewable with mplayer but not on a hardware player, and which cannot be transcoded successfully. I may be old-fashioned (I admit it, I *am* old fashioned), but I hate to see the very last copy of some rare video trapped in an untranscodeable format. I have spent weeks recovering some rare bit of footage from vfr hell. You can, of course, screw up anything... There are a thousand commercial dvd's created every year with hard-telecine and pathological interlacing. When I see dot-crawl on a dvd that was not mastered from analog video I WANT TO SCREAM! (Apparently some mastering companies create an analog intermediate, and then further enhance their crime by messing up the interlacing in the final transfer).
