Ordered Chapters and You

One of the most interesting features of the Matroska container is Ordered Chapters. Admitedly until recently I wasn’t such a big fan of it, due to lack of support for them in linux, or anything other than Haali’s splitter really. I understood the point and found them to be clever and useful (although after using them I disabled it due to not wanting to have to watch the OP of a series at the time) however I never really thought much about how good they are. Recently Kovensky and elenril patched the mplayer PKGBUILD for Ophion, it now has support for ordered chapters.

Ordered chapters are a function of matroska that allows segments of a file to be externally linked. Think of the video file as a php web page for example. Obviously the site looks like 1 big page, but on the server end its a series of php includes to ‘mux’ a bigger file out of. With ordered chapters, segments are linked to allow clips from other files to be included in the main file without it being seen by the viewer. Take for example the DVD rip of Shigofumi I am watching at the moment. The episodes themselves contain the opening scene, the main episode, the ending, and the next episode preview, but no opening theme song. The OP is a separate file, but with ordered chapters in my mplayer, smplayer reads it like one file, along with timestamps and subtitles.

It took a bit of tweaking to get subtitles using the ssa/ass library to work (-correct-pts in mplayer options will fix it) however I’m pretty happy with it now. I haven’t commited the new package to the repository yet, considering making a testing repository, but it all seems fairly solid and stable so far. If anyone would like to try it out, the package can ge found here.

For more information, read what TheFluff has written over on Walls of TL;DR

January 4, 2009 | Filed Under Fansubbing, Linux, Ophion Project 

Comments

4 Responses to “Ordered Chapters and You”

  1. rofflwafflsNo Gravatar on January 10th, 2009 5:37 AM

    >Think of the video file as a php web page for example.

    ._.

  2. EmessNo Gravatar on January 12th, 2009 3:52 AM

    Only in the sense of include()

    Think of it like include(‘$_segmentUID’), rather than a require(), it doesn’t NEED to have it, but if it does it looks better, objectively anyway. I hate OP’s. To the player, or webserver, it’s multiple files, but to the viewer/browser, it’s a single clip that plays as designed. Obviously PHP is a horrible way of describing it, but it works to a point.

  3. MandarinkaNo Gravatar on February 7th, 2009 1:25 PM

    Uh, little something, it’s not Elen*d*ril, it’s Elenril.

  4. EmessNo Gravatar on February 10th, 2009 10:59 AM

    Fix’d \o

Leave a Reply