.TH MKVMERGE "1" "April 2003" "mkvmerge v0.2" "User Commands" .SH NAME mkvmerge \- Merge multimedia streams into a Matroska file .SH SYNOPSIS .B mkvmerge [\fIglobal options\fR] \-o \fIout\fR [\fIoptions\fR] [[\fIoptions\fR] ...] [@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 mkvmerge 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. .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. .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. .LP Options that only apply to text subtitle tracks: .TP \fB\-\-no\-utf8\-subs\fR With this option text subtitles will not be recoded, and the track's CodecId will be set to S_TEXT/ASCII. Without this option the text subtitles will be converted to UTF\-8, and the track's CodecId will be set to S_TEXT/UTF8. \fBmkvmerge\fR uses the value of \fILC_CTYPE\fR as the source charset or ISO\-8859\-15 if \fILC_CTYPE\fR is not set. .LP Other options: .TP \fB\-l\fR, \fB\-\-list\-types\fR Lists supported input file types. .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 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 * MP3 audio files .TP * AC3 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 AC3 and MP3 audio by duplicating/removing packets at the beginning. .TP * Text subtitles can be read from SRT (SubRipper / subrip) files or taken from other OGM files. .TP * PCM, AC3 and MP3 audio work well under Windows and with MPlayer. .LP What not works: .TP * Matroska files cannot be read at the moment. .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 . .SH SEE ALSO .BR mkvinfo (1) .SH WWW The newest version can always be found at .UR http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/ .UE