… Known containers are the good old AVI, or the MPEG container ( .mpg , .mpeg ), Quicktime ( .mov ), Realmedia ( .rm ), MP4 ( .mp4 ), etc.
Matroska is an opensource alternative to all of them, and is able to offer a lot of features that others dont have have.
Matroska aims to become THE standard of multimedia container formats. It was derived from a project called MCF, but differentiates from it significantly because it is based on EBML (Extensible Binary Meta Language), a binary derivative of XML. EBML enables the Matroska Development Team to gain significant advantages in terms of future format extensibility, without breaking file support in old parsers.
http://www.matroska.org/technical/whatis/index.html
