header removal compression Options

[warpath6]

This is something that is becomming more and more used now with the new version of "mkvmerge" !!! Quite a lot of recent mkv releases on the web are using "header reomoval compression" which basically means you won't have any sound when playing your mkv movies through the WDTV

Quote
The Matroska specifications know a feature called "header removal compression". This allows a muxer to keep a certain number of bytes that are identical for each frame in the track headers removing them from the individual frames. This reduces the size of the tracks significantly without altering the content as a demuxer can add the bytes found in the track headers to each frame during demuxing.

Starting with v4.1.0 mkvmerge uses header removal compression for a couple of track types by default. These include AC3, DTS and MP3 audio tracks as well as Dirac and MPEG-4 part 2 (aka. XviD/DivX) video tracks. The user muxing a file may disable it by explicitely selecting 'none' as the compression scheme for such a track.

If your player has difficulties playing such files then it is a bug in that player or in the demuxer but not in mkvmerge. This feature has been part of the Matroska specification since more than six years, and there's no excuse for refusing to add support for it.

Can this feature please be added ASAP.

[WDUser]

As I've mentioned previously, it's all well and good adding this feature and then acting all holier than thou, stating that "This feature has been part of the Matroska specification since more than six years, and there's no excuse for refusing to add support for it." If it was really such an important feature (worth 'breaking' files for), why is mkvtoolnix adding support for it only now? I'm not against the feature, mind you, but they need to realise that it's not only about software players any more, which might have been the case 6 years ago, but hardware players too. Obviously firmware updates don't come out regularly for such devices, if ever. Even for software players, if it's not open source and cannot be modified easily, you're at the mercy of the author/company to release an update. Of course, no-one can help you if you happen to love using (for whatever reason) an older closed source software player that's no longer supported (maybe the author/company itself has disappeared).

So what they really needed to do was either simply make the default option "None" instead of "Yes", or at least have provided an (optional) dialog box on saving asking if the user wants to turn the feature on because of ABC advantages, keeping in mind XYZ caveats.

Anyway, you need to contact WD Support and see if they will ever implement this, or post in the official forum (I'm pretty sure it's already been requested there multiple times).