mkvtoolnix/mkvmerge.1

.TH MKVMERGE "1" "April 2003" "mkvmerge v0.4.3" "User Commands"
.SH NAME
mkvmerge \- Merge multimedia streams into a Matroska file
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B mkvmerge
[\fIglobal options\fR] \-o \fIout\fR [\fIoptions\fR] <file1> [[\fIoptions\fR] <file2> ...] [@optionsfile]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.LP
This program takes the input from several media files and joins
their streams (all of them or just a selection) into a Matroska file.
.UR http://www.matroska.org/
.UE
.LP
Global options:
.TP
\fB\-v\fR, \fB\-\-verbose\fR
Increase verbosity.
.TP
\fB\-q\fR, \fB\-\-quiet\fR
Suppress status output.
.TP
\fB\-o\fR, \fB\-\-output\fR \fIout\fR
Write to the file '\fIout\fR'.
.TP
\fB\-\-cluster\-length \fR \fIn[ms]\fR
Put at most \fIn\fR data blocks into each cluster. If the number is
postfixed with 'ms' then put at most \fIn\fR milliseconds of data into
each cluster. The maximum length for a cluster is 65535ms. Programs will
only be able to seek to clusters, so creating larger clusters may lead to
imprecise seeking and/or processing.
.TP
\fB\-\-no\-cues\fR
Tells \fBmkvmerge\fR not to create and write the cue data which can be compared
to an index in an AVI. Matroska files can be played back without the cue
data, but seeking will probably be imprecise and slower. Use this only if
you're really desparate for space or for testing purposes. See also option
\fB\-\-cues\fR which can be specified for each input file.
.TP
\fB\-\-no\-meta\-seek\fR
The meta seek information is stored along with the headers at the beginning
of the file and points to the cue entries (the index). This allows a player
to quickly find the index and uses very little space. It should be left on
and only disabled for testing purposes. At the moment \fB\-\-no\-cues\fR
implies \fB\-\-no\-meta\-seek\fR.
.TP
\fB\-\-meta\-seek\-size\fR \fId\fR
Reserve \fRd\fR bytes for the meta seek information (see
\fB\-\-no\-meta\-seek). Default value is 100 bytes which should be enough.
\fBmkvmerge\fR will abort with an appropriate warning message if the space
is not enough and also provide the optimal size to use with this option.
This option is normally not needed.
.TP
\fB\-\-no\-lacing\fR
Disable lacing for all tracks. This will increase the file's size, especially
if there are many audio tracks. This option is not intended for everyday use.
.TP
\fB\-\-split\fR <\fId[k|m|g]\fR> or \fB\-\-split\fR <\fIHH:MM:SS\fR|\fIns\fR>
Splits the output file after a given size or a given time. For splitting after
a specific size the parameter \fId\fR may end with k, m or g to indicate
that the size is in KB, MB or GB respectively. For time-based splitting use
the form HH:MM:SS or add 's' to the number of seconds \fIn\fRafter which the
file should be split.
.br
For this splitting mode the output filename is treated differently than for
the normal operation. It may contain a printf like expression '%d' including
an optional field width, e.g. '%02d'. If it does then the current file number
will be formatted appropriately and inserted at that point in the filename.
If there is no such pattern then a pattern of '-%03d' is assumed right before
the file's extension: '-o output.mkv' would result in 'output-001.mkv' and
so on. If there's no extension then '-%03d' will be appended to the name.
.TP
\fB\-\-split\-max\-files\fR <\fIn\fR>
Create at most \fIn\fR files, even if the last file will be longer or larger
than indicated by \fB\-\-split\fR.
.TP
\fB\-\-dont\-link\fR
Do not link files to one another when splitting the output file. See the
section \fBFILE LINKING\fR below for details.
.TP
\fB\-\-link\-to\-previous\fR <\fIUID\fR>
Links the first output file to the segment with the given \fIUID\fR. See the
section \fBFILE LINKING\fR below for details.
.TP
\fB\-\-link\-to\-next\fR <\fIUID\fR>
Links the last output file to the segment with the given \fIUID\fR. See the
section \fBFILE LINKING\fR below for details.
.LP
Options that can be used for each input file:
.TP
\fB\-a\fR, \fB\-\-atracks\fR <\fIn\fR,\fIm\fR,...>
Copy the audio tracks \fIn\fR, \fIm\fR etc.
Default: copy all audio tracks.
.TP
\fB\-d\fR, \fB\-\-vtracks\fR <\fIn\fR,\fIm\fR,...>
Copy the video tracks \fIn\fR, \fIm\fR etc.
Default: copy all video tracks.
.TP
\fB\-s\fR, \fB\-\-stracks\fR <\fIn\fR,\fIm\fR,...>
Copy the subtitle tracks \fIn\fR, \fIm\fR etc.
Default: copy all subtitle tracks.
.TP
\fB\-A\fR, \fB\-\-noaudio\fR
Don't copy any audio track from this file.
.TP
\fB\-D\fR, \fB\-\-novideo\fR
Don't copy any video track from this file.
.TP
\fB\-T\fR, \fB\-\-nosubs\fR
Don't copy any subtitle track from this file.
.TP
\fB\-y\fR, \fB\-\-sync\fR <\fId\fR[,\fIo\fR[/\fIp\fR]]>
Synchronize manually, delay the audio track by \fId\fR ms.
.br
\fId\fR > 0: Pad with silent samples.
.br
\fId\fR < 0: Remove samples from the beginning.
.br
\fIo\fR/\fIp\fR: adjust the timestamps by \fIo\fR/\fIp\fR to fix
linear drifts. \fIp\fR defaults to 1000 if omitted. Both \fIo\fR and
\fIp\fR can be floating point numbers.
.br
Defaults: no manual synch correction (which is the same as \fId\fR = 0 and
\fIo\fR/\fIp\fR = 1.0).
.TP
\fB\-\-cues\fR <\fInone\fR|\fIiframes\fR|\fIall\fR>
Controls for which tracks cue (index) entries are created. \fInone\fR inhibits
the creation of cue entries for all tracks contained in the following
source files. For \fIiframes\fR only blocks with no backward or forward
references ( = I frames in video tracks) are put into the cue sheet. \fIall\fR
causes \fBmkvmerge\fR to create cue entries for all blocks which will make
the file very big.
.br
The default is \fIiframes\fR for video tracks and \fInone\fR for all others.
See also option \fB\-\-no\-cues\fR which inhibits the creation of cue
entries regardless of the \fB\-\-cues\fR options used.
.TP
\fB\-\-default\-track\fR
Sets the 'default' flag for all tracks read from this file. If the user does
not explicitly select a track himself then the player should prefer the
track that has his 'default' flag set. Only one track of each kind (audio,
video, subttiles) can have his 'default' flag set.
.TP
\fB\-\-language\fR <\fIlanguage\fR>
Sets the language for all tracks read from this file. Only ISO639-2 codes
are allowed. All languages including their ISO639-2 codes can be listed
with the \fB\-\-list\-languages\fR option.
.LP
Options that only apply to video tracks:
.TP
\fB\-f\fR, \fB\-\-fourcc\fR <\fIFourCC\fR>
Forces the FourCC to the specified value. Works only for video tracks.
.TP
\fB\-\-aspect\-ratio\fR <\fIar\fR|\fIw\fR/\fIh\fR>
Sets the aspect ratio for the track. The ratio can be given either as a
floating point number or as 'widht/height', e.g. 16/9.
.LP
Options that only apply to subtitle tracks:
.TP
\fB\-\-sub\-charset\fR
Sets the charset for the conversion to UTF-8 for UTF-8 subtitles. If not
specified the charset will be derived from the current locale settings.
.LP
Other options:
.TP
\fB\-l\fR, \fB\-\-list\-types\fR
Lists supported input file types.
.TP
\fB\-\-list\-languages\fR
Lists all languages and their ISO639-2 code which can be used with the
\fB\-\-language\fR option.
.TP
\fB\-h\fR, \fB\-\-help\fR
Show usage information.
.TP
\fB\-V\fR, \fB\-\-version\fR
Show version information.
.TP
\fB@\fR\fIoptionsfile\fR
Reads additional command line arguments from the file \fIoptionsfile\fR.
Lines whose first non-whitespace character is a hash mark (#) are treated
as comments and ignored. Whitespaces at the start and end of a line will
be stripped. If a space is encountered and the line starts with '\-' then
the line will be split into exactly two arguments - the string before the
space and the string after it. There is no meta character escaping.
.br
The command line \fBmkvmerge \-o "my file.mkv" -A "a movie.avi" sound.ogg\fR
could be converted into the following option file:
.br
# Write to the file "my file.mkv".
.br
\-o my file.mkv
.br
# Only take the video from "a movie.avi".
.br
\-A a movie.avi
.br
sound.ogg


.SH USAGE
.LP
For each file the user can select which tracks \fBmkvmerge\fR should take.
They are all put into the file specified with '-o'. A list of known
(and supported) source formats can be obtained with the '-l' option.


.SH EXAMPLES
.LP
Let's assume you have a file called \fIMyMovie.avi\fP and the audio track in a
separate file, e.g. \fIMyMovie.wav\fP. First you want to encode the audio to
OGG:
.LP
$ \fBoggenc -q4 -oMyMovie.ogg MyMovie.wav\fP
.LP
After a couple of minutes you can join video and audio:
.LP
$ \fBmkvmerge -o MyMovie-with-sound.mkv MyMovie.avi MyMovie.ogg\fP
.LP
If your AVI already contains an audio track then it will be copied aswell
(if \fBmkvmerge\fR supports the audio format). To avoid that simply do
.LP
$ \fBmkvmerge -o MyMovie-with-sound.mkv -A MyMovie.avi MyMovie.ogg\fP
.LP
After some minutes of consideration you rip another audio track, e.g.
the director's comments or another language to \fIMyMovie-add-audio.wav\fP.
Encode it again and join it up with the other file:
.LP
$ \fBoggenc -q4 -oMyMovie-add-audio.ogg MyMovie-add-audio.wav\fP
.br
$ \fBmkvmerge -o MM-complete.mkv MyMovie-with-sound.mkv MyMovie-add-audio.ogg\fP
.LP
The same result can be achieved with
.LP
$ \fBmkvmerge -o MM-complete.mkv -A MyMovie.avi MyMovie.ogg \\\fP
.br
  \fBMyMovie-add-audio.ogg\fP
.LP
Now fire up mplayer and enjoy. If you have multiple audio tracks (or even
video tracks) then you can tell mplayer which track to play with the
\&'\fB-vid\fP' and '\fB-aid\fP' parameters. These are 0-based and do not
distinguish between video and audio.
.LP
If you need an audio track synchronized you can do that easily with
.LP
$ \fBmkvmerge -o goodsync.mkv -A source.avi -s 200 outofsync.ogg\fP
.LP
This would add 200ms of silence at the beginning of the audio tracks taken from
\fIoutofsync.ogg\fP. And \fB-s\fP always applies to all audio tracks in a
source file. If you want to apply \fB-s\fP only to a specific track then take
the same source file more than once and add \fB-a\fP and \fB-s\fP accordingly.
.LP
Some movies start synced correctly but slowly drift out of sync. For these
kind of movies you can specify a delay factor that is applied to all
timestamps - no data is added or removed. So if you make that factor too
big or too small you'll get bad results. An example is that an episode
I transcoded was 0.2 seconds out of sync at the end of the movie which
was 77340 frames long. At 29.97fps 0.2 seconds correspond to approx. 6
frames. So I did
.LP
$ \fBmkvmerge -o goodsync.mkv -s 0,77346/77340 outofsync.mkv\fP
.LP
The result was fine.
.LP
The sync options can also be used for subtitles in the same manner.
.LP
For text subtitles you can either use some Windows software (like
\fBSubRipper\fR) or the \fBsubrip\fR package found in \fBtranscode(1)\fR's
sources (in \fBcontrib/subrip\fR). The general process is:
.TP
1.
extract a raw subtitle stream from the source:
.br
$ \fBtccat -i /path/to/copied/dvd/ -T 1 -L | \\
.br
    tcextract -x ps1 -t vob -a 0x20 | \\
.br
    subtitle2pgm -o mymovie\fP
.TP
2.
convert the resulting PGM images to text with \fBgocr\fP:
.br
$ \fBpgm2txt mymovie\fP
.TP
3.
spell-check the resulting text files:
.br
$ \fBispell -d american *txt\fP
.TP
4.
convert the text files to a SRT file:
.br
$ \fBsrttool -s -w -i mymovie.srtx -o mymovie.srt\fP
.LP
The resulting file can be used as another input file for \fBmkvmerge\fR:
.LP
$ \fBmkvmerge -o mymovie.mkv mymovie.avi mymovie.srt\fP


.SH SUBTITLES
.LP
There are several text subtitle formats that can be embedded into Matroska.
At the moment \fBmkvmerge\fR supports only one simple text subtitle formats:
SRT (Subtitle Ripper). These subtitles should normally be recoded to UTF-8
so that they can be displayed correctly by a player. For recoded subtitles
Matroska specifies S_TEXT/UTF8 as the codec ID. There's also S_TEXT/ASCII
which assumes that no conversion is necessary.
.LP
\fBmkvmerge\fR does this conversion automatically based on the system's current
locale. If the user does not want that conversion then he has to use the
\fB\-\-sub\-type ascii\fR switch. If the subtitle charset is not the same as
the system's current charset then the user can use \fB\-\-sub\-charset\fR
switch. If the subtitles are already encoded in UTF-8 then you can use
\fB\-\-sub\-charset UTF\-8\fR.


.SH FILE LINKING
.LP
Matroska supports file linking which simply says that a specific file is the
predecessor or successsor of the current file. To be precise, it's not really
the files that are linked but the Matroska segments. As most files will
probably only put one Matroska segment into a file I simply say 'file linking'
although 'segment linking' would be more appropriate.
.LP
Each segment is identified by a unique 128 bit wide segmend UID. This UID
is automatically generated by \fBmkvmerge\fR. The linking is done primarily
via putting the segment UIDs of the previous/next file into the segment
header information. \fBmkvinfo(1)\fR prints these UIDs if it finds them.
.LP
If a file is split into several smaller ones and linking is used then the
timecodes will not start at 0 again but will continue where the last file
has left off. This way the absolute time is kept even if the previous files
are not available (e.g. when streaming). If no linking is used then the
timecodes should start at 0 for each file. By default \fBmkvmerge\fR uses
file linking. If you don't want that you can turn it off with the
\'\fB\-\-dont\-link\fR\' option. This option is only useful if splitting
is activated as well.
.LP
Regardless of whether splitting is active or not the user can tell
\fBmkvmerge\fR to link the produced files to specific UIDs. This is achieved
with the options '\fB\-\-link\-to\-previous\fR' and '\fB\-\-link\-to\-next\fR'.
These options accept a segment UID in the format that \fBmkvinfo(1)\fR
outputs: 16 hexadecimal numbers between 0x00 and 0xff prefixed with '0x' each,
e.g. \fI0x41 0xda 0x73 0x66 0xd9 0xcf 0xb2 0x1e 0xae 0x78 0xeb 0xb4 0x5e 0xca
0xb3 0x93\fR. Alternatively a shorter form can be used: 16 hexadecimal numbers
between 0x00 and 0xff without the '0x' prefixes and without the spaces, e.g.
\fI41da7366d9cfb21eae78ebb45ecab393\fR.
.LP
If splitting is used then the first file is linked to the UID given with
\'\fB\-\-link\-to\-previous\fR\' and the last file is linked to the UID given
with \'\fB\-\-link\-to\-next\fR\'. If splitting is not used then the one
output file will be linked to both of the two UIDs.

.SH NOTES
.LP
What works:
.TP
*
AVI as the video and audio source (only raw PCM, MP3 and AC3 audio tracks at
the moment)
.TP
*
OGG as the source for video, audio (Vorbis, raw PCM, MP3 and AC3 audio) and
text streams (subtitles).
.TP
*
WAV as the audio source
.TP
*
AAC audio files (only those with ADTS headers before each packet)
.TP
*
AC3 audio files
.TP
*
DTS audio files
.TP
*
MP3 audio files
.TP
*
Track selection
.TP
*
Manual audio synchronization by adding silence/removing packets for Vorbis
audio and for text streams by adjusting the starting point and duration.
.TP
*
Manual audio synchronization for AAC, AC3, DTS and MP3 audio by duplicating
or removing packets at the beginning.
.TP
*
Text subtitles can be read from SRT (SubRipper / subrip) files or
taken from other OGM files.
.LP
What not works:
.TP
*
Manual audio synchronization for PCM sound (who needs it anyway?)
.LP
Planned functionality:
.TP
*
support for other subtitle formats
.TP
*
chapter information
.TP
*
a lot of other stuff, like tags, user information etc.
.SH AUTHOR
.I mkvmerge
was written by Moritz Bunkus <moritz@bunkus.org>.
.SH SEE ALSO
.BR mkvinfo (1)
.SH WWW
The newest version can always be found at
.UR http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/
<http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/>
.UE