Container conundrum

So, I'm reasonably confident that your claimed mp4 overhead is simply incorrect. I don't know why.

I measured it as 86245 using one method (segment sizes from mp4dump). A friend who has implemented the mp4 demux checked the file and also calculated 86245 using his own method. My guess was that mplayer must be including packet length data in the dump output, but I just repeated your method and got 13871183 bytes video, 3796188 bytes audio. Resulting in 86245. Exactly the same figure calculated by two other distinct methods.

Perhaps you could explain why I'm getting a different figure using exactly the same method as you? I'm using Mplayer SVN-r29800-4.4.2.

I remuxed the above Theora file we were discussing for minimum overhead using a copy of libogg with the default 4k page size target removed:

http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/bbb_theora_4...

This file has 84604 bytes of container overhead.

This is somewhat lower overhead than your mp4 file. Now that I understand a bit more about the mp4 format I find it actually somewhat surprising— Ogg provides a lot of properties that MP4 does not. Like being incrementally written in a complete form.

I hope this update convinces you to discontinue spreading these mistaken claims.

Cheers.