Been ages since I last posted anything here. Just kind of lost interest, and got busy with other projects (as it usually is).

One of the things I’ve been working on, is ruby-matroska. A gem designed primarily for working with ordered chapters in matroska files.

The reason I started was that my media player of choice, mplayer, currently doesn’t support ordered chapters and all that nifty goodness. And since my anime is slowly adapting it, and that we decided to use it for our Death Note releases, actually being able to use it was kind of important.

ruby-matroska consists of two binaries, of which only one is complete.

• playlist takes a Matroska-file as an argument, analyzes it, and creates a mplayer compatible playlist, or launches mplayer with the right files.
• unorder, which is incomplete, takes a directory with ordered chapters, analyzes and creates self-contained matroska files, containing all the linked chapters in a file of their own. I can’t see myself actually using the last one, but since I’m releasing this gem upon the world, I thought it would be a nice feature to have.

It’s also open source, and the source is available through my github repository. Also got a bugtracker over on Lighthouse, but since I’m using the free version, I’m not really sure if it’s accessible for others.

I’m currently relying on the user having mkvtoolnix installed, but in the future, I would like to extend this project to also include a Matroska-parser. This would not only make it do it’s thing a lot slower, but also be a fun lesson in implementing others formats.

Besides from removing dependencies, and making sure my SUIDCache-class is needed, I’m not really sure what practical use this library could have. And since I’m unable to find a completed EBML or matroska-library written for Ruby, I’m guessing not many others have seen a need either. (Or my Google-fu is just getting weaker)