mkv

[Mitsuhide]

Damn, tl:dr most of this last page.

Anyways, the bottom line is you cannot please everyone. Some people want HQ h264, some don't give a you know what. Does h264 have its benefits? Yes sir. Do most non-tech savvy people care? NO.

Containers such as Matroska do add overhead to the overall filesize... people mistake it as "compressing better" than AVI but that's not the case... AVI just has a higher overhead hence adding maybe one or two MB. Not that big of a deal.

As for the subs... for those of you who do not have the fonts, the encoder is supposed to "attach" the fonts within the container so you don't need them locally. This is a fault on the encoder, not yours. They cannot expect everyone to have a mass folder of pretty fonts just to watch shows. Also, typesetting and styling can all be hardcoded as well on h264/mkv... I see no reason why you would have to change to softsubs just because it supports them.

And stop using codec packs... learn to use and update the standalone decoders. CCCP is slow to update never versions (ex. ffdshow) and K-lite will install multiple decoders that do the same codec and will cause conflicts in the long run.

Edit:
Oh yea, to the guy who likes chapters: Demultiplexing the AVI into Matroska is very easy and fast. While you're doing that you can quickly add a .txt file with timecodes for chapters. Of course you would have to watch the video first and decide the timecodes to set the chapters, but other than that it's very fast.

http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoo ... ptereditor (See 4.3.1)

[pekcun]

And stop using codec packs... learn to use and update the standalone decoders. CCCP is slow to update never versions (ex. ffdshow) and K-lite will install multiple decoders that do the same codec and will cause conflicts in the long run.

I started using CCCP after I had problems watching .mkv DVDrips with VLC, tried to use K-Lite but it was just a huge mass of codecs, some of which are useful, some of which I will never need and will conflict with other codecs that I need.
Anyways, they (very)rarely update, true, but it works perfectly for what I need it so far.
Besides, I use CoreAVC for H264 encodes instead of FFDshow. Not a single problem after that.

Containers such as Matroska do add overhead to the overall filesize... people mistake it as "compressing better" than AVI but that's not the case... AVI just has a higher overhead hence adding maybe one or two MB. Not that big of a deal.

More like 40-80mb if you count the switch from hardsubs to softsubs.

[Mitsuhide]

Containers such as Matroska do add overhead to the overall filesize... people mistake it as "compressing better" than AVI but that's not the case... AVI just has a higher overhead hence adding maybe one or two MB. Not that big of a deal.

More like 40-80mb if you count the switch from hardsubs to softsubs.

You're kidding me right? You still seem to misunderstand what a container does, and even then the difference with the actual encode with subs hardcoded on is negligible.

[pekcun]

More like 40-80mb if you count the switch from hardsubs to softsubs.

You're kidding me right? You still seem to misunderstand what a container does, and even then the difference with the actual encode with subs hardcoded on is negligible.

I meant if they switch to softsubs = no 'fancy' sub effects, hence smaller filesize. No? But that's not why I said the difference is more like 40-80MB since I've seen shows that's encoded in both h264 and xvid with the same raw that has a pretty big difference in size.
Example:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ZP1KXMW4
File size: 148.29 MB
And
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=RCEDDX9Y
File size: 232.85 MB

Unless you didn't include the encodes when you said the difference is just one or two MB, whereas this would be all a big misunderstanding.

[Mitsuhide]

Then you've misunderstood my whole point.

I'm only talking about containers, it has nothing to do with the actual video encode itself. You have to dump the raw video/audio data into something, and all of them will append overhead. Matroskas' overhead is very little, whereas AVI tends to be more... but only a MB or two (if that).

If you wanna talk about those encodes then ok. First of all, the 2 files you linked are horrible examples. The MKV isn't even h264. Have you even scanned the data of the 2 files?

MKV: DivX5+AAC 836kbps total
AVI: XviD+PCM 1312kbps total

^THAT is why the filesize difference is so huge. Bits = filesize. For some odd reason they included untouched PCM (136MB!) in the larger AVI file, as opposed to a compressed AAC audio in the MKV. It has nothing to do with the subs being hard or soft, and definitely not the container itself.