One problem I can see in creating developer interest is that anime viewers probably make up a very small fraction of the universe of mplayer users. Moreover most of those people are watching XviD in AVI files; a quick perusal of any non-anime torrent tracker shows that. So I can see why the mplayer developers probably think there are other things that require their limited resources before they get to ordered chapters in Matroska. Iit also seems like ordered chapters only have a substantial benefit in series programming, where there's repeated content from episode to episode. People watching one-off shows like movies won't be looking for support for ordered chapters either.

As long as this is used to split OP/EDs from episode content, I don't really care. If I want to watch the whole episode I'll just put the three pieces into my smplayer playlist. If we start seeing more fine-grained "chapterization" (to coin a term), say splitting the segments before and after the mid-program break into separate files, I'd find that annoying and unnecessary.

I understand how this might benefit encoders, and I understand the arguments in favor of reducing download sizes and disk storage, but I still don't see why this is being posed entirely as an either/or question. Why can't we have both chapters and complete episodes? From the discussions presented here, it doesn't sound like it's going to be particularly easy for the viewers to reassemble the files unless they're pretty handy with things like mkvtoolnix. Would it be that much more of a burden to distribute complete episodes as well?

This statement is highly untrue. Of the small sample of ffmpeg developers I know, the ratio of anime viewers to non-anime-viewers is much, much higher than in the ordinary population... its just that, being proper weeaboos, they suppress their power level accordingly :D

Reread my post. I wasn't talking about the developers; I was talking about mplayer users. The discussion here has focused on whether the user community will bring sufficient pressure on the developers to add support for ordered chapters. A quick Google search with "site:lists.mplayerhq.hu" brings up just a handful of postings about this subject on the mplayer-users list (and not a whole lot of postings on the other mplayer lists either). I stand by my claim that anime viewers are unlilkely to represent a substantial fraction of the mplayer user community.

A nice guy by the name of Mosc has written a program that automatically un-orders the ordered chapters for you by scanning all MKV's in a given directory, and outputs a .bat file that runs mkvmerge a lot to put linked files back into normal files.

Download here: http://upload.riposte.nl/upload/ChapterUnorderer.7z

Usage: chapterunorderer <source directory> <destination batch file>
(without <>'s)

Requires that dumpsuid and mkvmerge are in your PATH (current directory works for dumpsuid; the mkvtoolnix package automatically adds itself to the PATH when installed so mkvmerge should already be there).

Because it's too much trouble for us subbers to seed two different versions, let alone when the two versions are basicly the same damn thing.

Long story short: we do all the work, and this make that said work easier, so we (at least I) will continue to do so

I re-requested that feature on the 14th and received a reply that encouraged me to forward it to ffmpeg-users. I just got around to doing that today, and I'll see what happens with that.

There is one other question about linked .mkv I found in my archive of the mplayer-users list, and the only reply brings up the security question again.

I don't subscribe to the dev lists, but it's nice to see that there is some (guarded) interest in adding the feature.

Not that I use VLC, but if the feature is added to ffmpeg, does VLC also pick up the ability to play Ordered Chapters?

Hopefully it won't, and thus it will drive people away from it once and for all.

Funnily enough, as far as I know VLC supports ordered chapters, it just doesn't support segment linking. If you try and load Kurenai 6 in it for example, it will create a virtual 24 minute timeline; it just starts at the start of the episode instead of the OP and closes the file when you try and view the ED.

Indeed, VLC does support ordered chapters, but not segment linking or editions.

Sadly that message itself has no replies. I was hoping to read some discussion of what precisely the "security question" is.

WanderingKnight tells us the devs are concerned about linking to files "behind the user's back" as it were. But suppose you put reasonable constraints on the files, like they must reside in the same directory as the linking file and carry appropriate permissions. Perhaps I think too much in *nix these days, but isn't that a sufficient security model and one that can be implemented cross-platform? (Maybe not in Windows?)

I'm also a bit curious as to how a linked file might pose a threat per se. I admit to not reading the Matroska specfication, but can the linked files be anything besides other Matroska files? Why would a linked file pose any greater threat than any other Matroska file?

So what really is the security threat involved in ordered chapters, and is Haali somehow immune to these threats? Inquiring minds and all that.

I'm not entirely sure about what exactly the issue is, either, but I'm no coder, so I didn't want to delve much into it. I see how there could be an issue with remotely accessed files, but with local files I don't see much of a problem, even less on Linux since you don't really run mplayer as root as you do on Windows.

Apparently lots of people are having problems with DirectVobSub not noticing subtitles after a linked OP or ED file plays. I'm one of them, and just looking around I found FOUR more threads here with the exact same problem.

See: This thread and This thread and This thread (Formula started using split chapters for Shugo Chara), and even earlier in the thread we're in right now. That's a significant number of people.

I'm having this problem, and I'm running Vista, the latest version of CCCP, a slightly older CoreAVC, and MPC. I use CoreAVC to play MKV files and not FFDshow.

The solution to this problem is very simple, I've found. After the OP plays (and subtitles fail to appear), double-click on the green DirectVobSub arrow in the taskbar. DirectVobSub settings will appear. Next, change the tab from "Main" to "General". For whatever reason, at this point VobSub "wakes up" and realizes there are subtitles again, and begins displaying correctly.

If anyone knows what is going on here, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could lend some advice. It's not a life-threatening problem, but it is annoying to have to "wake up" VobSub every time after you play an OP file.

Thanks for listening - and hopefully people will realize now that this is a specific problem with the new chapter system and not someone's individual PC. Perhaps it's an issue with CoreAVC (edit: just tried it running FFDshow, no change), or perhaps its something with VobSub, I don't know.

For those using Linux, I have made a patch for ordered chapters for mplayer, so if you are daring enough to use the development version just download the subversion version of mplayer and take my patch from the development mailing list archives. Even if (big if) my patch is approved it will probably take a long time until it makes it into a release version.

After some trouble (-> who have become -≥ :confused: ), and not using the exact same revision (26913 instead of 26910), the patch work :D

No problem with Shugo Chara.
With Kurenai I have a little problem after the ending the video simply stop instead of showing the preview (episode 6, 7 and 8).

Edit : now mplayer refuse to play the latest mkv release done by Eclipse or GG. I think I will remove th patch for now :D

Thanks for the feedback! Odd that Kurenai didn't work, that was my primary testing
file. Did you use the smaller version?

I tried some stuff from GG, apparantly it is ok to skip the chapter end times.
Gotta fix that, new patch soon.
Edit: new patch available

No, I use the 720P version.

Funny. People usually forget... or rather don't know about an amusing fact - all endings in almost every TV series are different. Not the background video itself, but credits with all seiyuu, animators and all those people. Even though there is probably one or two people who reads them and barely five who cares - those are different.

Openings, on other hand, are the same throughout a whole series, or a significant part of series.

"Who needs those credits", you might be saying right now, but for the release to be complete those need to be present.

PS I, personally, don't like OC because that's a stop halfway through to promised DVD-style navigation inside a single file (which wasn't implemented in Matroska yet, AFAIK).

I don't think people are unaware of that, it's just they assume their audience isn't interested in the credits anyway. I'm not a fan of it myself because I do occasionally need to check credits and the video is the best source, but I can understand why they do it. It can take a fair bit of time because it needs re-timing, possibly editing so karaoke isn't blocking text etc, then re-encoding, whereas using an existing encode can be as simple as muxing in with a chapter file. It's not just the ordered chapter folks doing this though, many fansub groups have been doing it with all their releases for ages, infact it's probably the norm.

I'd appreciate it if subbers left the ED in each episode as it is. They never usually need as many bits as an OP, so there won't be a significant loss in video quality of the rest of the episode, and retiming is easy with Aegisub. I can undertstand entirely why someone would want to encode the OP seperatly in many cases, especially Kurenai's OP, has a massive effect on the quality of the whole episode. Using ordered chapters just to save bandwidth though is just silly.

I just wonder... I'm watching Deculture's Zettai Karen Children fansub right now, they're like magic, those encodes, just silly 170 megabytes (704x400, needless to say) but looking as clean as day. Maybe the quality problem is not really in space economy?

hurr durr herpa derp derf

Compressibility varies from show to show, from episode to episode and from scene to scene. It depends on a lot of factors like sharpness, amount of motion, detail levels etc etc. Some shows (or certain episodes of some shows) can easily be squeezed into 100MB or less per episode and still look good, others require 300+MB even for SD resolutions. Making anime episodes at 704x400 look good at 175mb per episode isn't difficult, it'll work fine for most shows.

The thing is that in many cases the OP/ED has a lot of very high-motion material that is not easily compressible, and cutting this out can save a lot of space, regardless of how well the rest of the show compresses and/or what the target size is.

On another note, this endless whining about the precious ending credits is getting tiresome. The three people who care can obviously read Japanese or the credits would be useless, so why aren't they watching raws? Also, as Doughnuts points out, it has for a long time been quite common to make one lossless encode of the OP/ED and then splice that in for each episode.