Fortunately, I can't carry a tune, but I had some idle thoughts and I was wondering what others might think about this topic. To start with, there are a multitude of video codecs and they each have their own benefits and drawbacks. I'm not going to get into that sea of despair.
But what about the wrappers (also called containers), which dictate the overall file format? Each wrapper contains video tracks, audio tracks and metadata. Apple has it's own generic baby, MOV and Microsoft has its archaic AVI. Then there are the "narrower" wrappers that are closely tied to the codecs, like the transport streams (mts, m2ts), mpg, mp4 and wmv, etc..
But lately, MXF (Material eXchange Format):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_Exchange_Format
seems to be showing up more and more as a possibility for unifying multimedia file structure.
Often, we are faced with questions like, "Is this AVI interlaced?" or "What's the field order?" Some of these problems relate to the lack of that type of information stored in a consistent manner in the file's metadata. It's not so difficult to rewrap a video file from one container to another, but if the information isn't in the original file, it isn't going to be in the new version either.
It would sure be nice ...
Nah! Never happen. By the time that there was a hi def standard in place for optical disks (Blu ray), the industry had moved on to other storage and transfer solutions. But we can always hope.
But what about the wrappers (also called containers), which dictate the overall file format? Each wrapper contains video tracks, audio tracks and metadata. Apple has it's own generic baby, MOV and Microsoft has its archaic AVI. Then there are the "narrower" wrappers that are closely tied to the codecs, like the transport streams (mts, m2ts), mpg, mp4 and wmv, etc..
But lately, MXF (Material eXchange Format):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_Exchange_Format
seems to be showing up more and more as a possibility for unifying multimedia file structure.
Often, we are faced with questions like, "Is this AVI interlaced?" or "What's the field order?" Some of these problems relate to the lack of that type of information stored in a consistent manner in the file's metadata. It's not so difficult to rewrap a video file from one container to another, but if the information isn't in the original file, it isn't going to be in the new version either.
It would sure be nice ...
Nah! Never happen. By the time that there was a hi def standard in place for optical disks (Blu ray), the industry had moved on to other storage and transfer solutions. But we can always hope.