I’m actually surprised that I didn’t find a topic about this when I did a search on the forums.
The Matroska MKV format is gaining in popularity because it supports multiple video, audio, subtitle and even chapter tracks. Playing an MKV file on the web is less than unheard of, but recently the DivX development team added support for it (and through their DivX web player plugin):
http://www.divx.com/en/software/divx-plus/codec-pack/mkv
This is all well and good for people that don’t mind asking their users to download a new plugin, and for users that don’t mind caching the entire video to scrub the playback (which can get up to 2+GB in size)… But it is not okay for me.
Is there any chance that Wowza could add support for MKV? I believe (not sure) that Wowza has an “encode on-the-fly” feature to convert WMVs to MP4s and vice versa to support the Flash/Silverlight differences… I think all it would take is to expand on this re-encoding feature to convert the MKV to a more standard format file, that way arguments or parameters can be passed through the stream URL to specify which video/audio/subtitle track should be used for the re-encode. Since the MKV format contains multiple video tracks, these tracks could be at various bitrates/sizes/fps. A bandwidth checking utility can be used to select which of the video tracks should be put in the re-encoded stream. The end user selects which audio/subtitle they wish to display, and all of these arguments/parameters could then be inserted into the stream url for Wowza to interpret.
If Wowza won’t officially support it, where might I find information on how to use the Wowza IDE to add the functionality myself?