I have expressed my preference for the MP4 format some time ago, which was to be meant mostly over the Ogg format from Xiph, most of the custom audio container formats like FLAC and WavPack (to a point; WV’s format could be much worse), and of course the AVI format. Although I do find quite a few advantages of MP4 over Matroska, I don’t despise that format at all.
The main problem I see with Matroska, actually, is the not so widely available implementation; I cannot play a Matroska video on either my cellphone (which, if somewhere were to think about it, is a Nokia E71 right now, not an iPhone, and will probably never be, I have my limits!), the PlayStation3 or the PSP. Up to last month, I couldn’t play it with my AppleTV either, which was quite a bit of a problem. Especially considering a lot of Anime fansubbers use that.
Now, since I was actually quite bored by the fact that, even though I was transcoding them, a lot of subtitles didn’t appear properly, I decided to try out XBMC; it was quite a pleasing experience actually, the Linux-based patch stick works like a charm, without going too much in the way of infringing Apple’s license as far as I can see, and the installation is quite quick. Unfortunately the latest software update on AppleTV (2.3.1) seems to have broken xbmc, which now starts no longer in fullscreen but rather in a Quartz window in the upper half of the screen.
So I ditched also XBMC (for now) for a derivative, boxee which, while being partially proprietaryware, seems to be a little more fine-tuned for AppleTV; it’s still more free software than the original operating system. Both XBMC and Boxee solve my subtitles problem since they both have a video calibration setup that allows to tell the software how much overscan the LCD panel is doing, and which pixel size ratio it has. Quite cool, Apple should really have done that too.
Also, I started using MediaTomb to serve my content without having to copy it on the AppleTV itself; this is working fine since I’m using ethernet-over-powerline adapters to connect the office with my bedroom, and thus there is enough bandwidth to stream it over. Unfortunately, here starts the first problem: while I was able somehow to get XBMC to play AVI files with external .srt subtitles, it fails on Boxee. Since the whole thing is bothersome anyway, I wanted to try an alternative: remux the content without re-encoding it, in Matroska Video files, with the subtitles embedded in them as a third track.
This seems to work fine from an AVI file, but fails badly when the source is an MP4 file, the resulting file seems corrupted with MPlayer and crashes Totem/GStreamer (that’s no news, my dmesg output fills easily with Totem’s thumbnailer’s crashes when I open my video library). Also, I have been yet unable to properly set the language of the tracks, which would help me to have the jap-sub-eng setup automatic on XBMC. If somebody knows how to do that properly, I’d be glad.
Anyway, there it goes another remuxing of the video library…