Free and independent film are experiencing an incredible boom right now, and the Blu-Ray eco-system with its DRM (or TPM) , region codes, and exorbitant patent licensing fees denies us access to that. So, I think it's time to do something about it.

Like stop distributing movies on physical media?

Video File Format: MKV container file with VP8 video and FLAC or Vorbis audio (this standard is similar, but a little more permissive than WebM, and is optimized for use on fixed media rather than downloads).

It doesn't seem like they have strong arguments to create a new standard that is almost but not quite compatible with WebM. The inclusion of FLAC is not a strong argument, rather a bad idea, cf http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

I'd have a little more faith in it if he was asking for more money.

Also I think he is belittling what Blu-Ray has to offer. Blu-Ray doesn't just provide 'menus', it provides an environment for writing Java applications that can do serious tricks with video (such as picture-in-picture.)

In fact, from an authoring pov, a Blu-Ray disk is more like an Android application with 25 GB of storage attached than a media file. Blu-Ray players have streaming media capabilities so it would also be possible to make a disk that is a "season's pass" to stream all the Red Sox games for a year.

Now, you can make a case that this is surplus capacity and that people would do fine with DVD menus or no menus at all. Maybe you're right. Certainly the full potential of Blu-Ray is hardly touched, and I know movie industry people are quite baffled about what to do with it. You can certainly find disks that make you watch annoying trailers -- on the other hand, I can point to many Blu-Ray disks that "just play" and that come with 6 hours of documentary content, commentary and other good stuff.

>The player will be written in Python with the python-gst, pywebkitgtk, and python-gtk

Why ? It would much more useful to me (and much less work for the developer) if you could write a VLC plugin.

If they are trying to create an interoperable standard the work plan seems to be missing the two most important parts.

1) Test suite of sample encoded files with expected decoder behaviour documented. This shouldn't be a random selection of different people's encodes but a carefully selected set of those pushing the boundaries of the spec. This should be used to test decoders rather than having a reference decoder that has to be copied bugs and all.

2) The counterpart to the above is a file validator that checks as much as possible that any given encoded file meets the specification.

Reference decoders only really make sense for codecs where you will expect a particular bitstream output for any input.

If they don't do both of those things it doesn't seem much more useful than just making some encoding recommendations for compatibility.

It's a noble goal, but a little too ambitious for one person to undertake by themselves though isn't it? Why not just start an open source project with the cash and get some developers on board? Use the money to buy tools and hardware needed, then let others help write the format and test.

I don't quite understand what this is about. it sounds to me that mkv already does most of the things?

I sincerely hope that this project gets fully funded but I think this comic (http://xkcd.com/927/) is very relevant in this context.

How is this better than a standard video file for the job that people hire a movie to do? I don't think I have ever been glad that I had a movie menu to play from, clicking a file is faster, more portable and more future proof.