Test suite

As the popularity of Matroska is quickly growing, it is becoming necessary to define a set of minimum features players should handle. As we are pushing old features like the header stripping, we realise a lot of players (hardware and software) don't support such simple features. Probably because they never had a set of source materials to validate their code against. So we have remedied this with a set of 8 files meant to cover the basic features a player should support to be considered a good Matroska player.

The emphasis is on the container support not on the codec. It’s possible some players may not support Theora for example in the “live” test file, but it’s always possible to generate a similar file with mkclean --live (download mkclean here).

The 8 files included in this set are:

• test1.mkv : Basic file
• test2.mkv : Non default timecodescale & aspect ratio
• test3.mkv : Header stripping & standard block
• test4.mkv : Live stream recording
• test5.mkv : Multiple audio/subtitles
• test6.mkv : Different EBML head sizes & cue-less seeking
• test7.mkv : Extra unknown/junk elements & damaged
• test8.mkv : Audio gap

We strongly encourage developers and companies that produce Matroska players to test these files on their product and make sure they all pass the test. We also encourage users to test these files too with their players and report the (non) success they are having. Later we will be producing a database of all known Matroska players and what test they pass/fail (but it won’t come until a few weeks).

Let us know if you have any suggestion on how to improve this test suite or if you think something is not correct.

You can download the test files on SourceForge and also look at the Release Notes accompanying these files.