Ogg
There’s a nice post from Måns on the difficiencies of the Ogg container format.
A little while ago I wondered why it was that anybody bothered with Ogg or Matroska when MPEG 4 Parts 12 & 14 (ISO Base Media and the MP4 container formats, respectively) were widely-supported and not completely horrible.
As far as I can tell, it turns out that Ogg and Matroska both pre-date the standardisation of MP4.
This left another issue: FOURCCs for the Xiph codecs haven’t been registered with the MPEG 4 Registration Authority.
…but it turns out upon further inspection that this isn’t an issue, because registration is not mandatory and Xiph have actually defined FOURCCs for their codecs.
Thus, the only thing stopping people using Theora, Vorbis, Tarkin, FLAC or Speex in MP4 containers (whatever the file extension might actually be) is… software.
Most of the software which supports these codecs already supports MP4 containers, so I wonder if this is something which would, perhaps with a little massaging, “just work” in a lot of cases. I think I might have to experiment later on.
