A guide to mkvmerge GUI (mmg)

Moritz Bunkus

Table of contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Setting up mkvmerge GUI
  3. Creating Matroska files
  4. The chapter editor


Introduction

What is Matroska?

(Note: simply copied from www.matroska.org.)

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.

If you need any more info please head over to Matroska's homepage.

What is mkvmerge? What is mkvmerge GUI?

mkvmerge and mkvmerge GUI (or just mmg) are two programs created by Moritz Bunkus. They're part of the mkvtoolnix package. mkvmerge can read a lot of different multimedia files and put their contents into Matroska files. Unfortunately this is a command line program, and not everyone is comfortable working on the command line. This is where mkvmerge GUI comes into play. It is a GUI that provides the user with an intuitive but powerful interface to mkvmerge.

Both programs are available for both Windows and GNU/Linux and other Unix derivatives. The program is licensed under the GPL, so the source code is available to anyone interested.

Obtaining the latest version

You can always find the latest version of mkvtoolnix on Moritz Bunkus' website. Windows users will have to download the runtime DLLs as well as the mkvtoolnix binaries. Linux/Unix users will probably download the sources and compile mkvtoolnix themselves.

Scope of this guide

This guide only focusses on the GUI part of these tools. All command line options are explained in detail in mkvmerge's man page/HTML page.


Setting up mkvmerge GUI

(Note: This section does not cover compilation and installation. mkvmerge's own documentation and the README files that are included in the mkvtoolnix package.)

The only thing that mmg needs to know is the location of the mkvmerge binary. Under normal circumstances it will be found automatically. But if not then you can select the binary to use on the Settings tab.


Creating Matroska files

Basics

mkvmerge strictly differentiates between files and tracks. An input file usually contains one or more tracks. mkvmerge needs at least one input file and the file name of the Matroska file it should create before it can do any work. Starting with this minimal set of options the user can add more input files, select advanced options for each track, apply some more global options etc.

The typical basic steps are:

  1. Select some input files,
  2. set language options for the tracks,
  3. set the movie/file title,
  4. select the file to write to and
  5. start the muxing process.

When mmg starts up it shows the first and probably most important tab: the input tab. Here you see four different elements. The topmost input box lists all input files. Directly under this box are options that apply to the currently selected input file.

The two buttons to the right of the upper list box can be used to add files to the list box with the + button and to remove the selected entry with the - button.

Once the user selects an input file in the upper list box the second list box will contains all tracks that can be read from this file. For each of these tracks the user can select track specific options with the input boxes and check boxes below the track listing. These options will be described in the following sections.

Options for input file

Once the user has added and selected an input file he can set options that apply to this specific file. At the moment only one such option has been implemented: No chapters. If this option is checked then mkvmerge will not try to copy chapters from this source file. More information about chapters can be found in the section about the chapter editor in this document and in mkvmerge's own documentation.

Options for each track

Depending on the type of the currently selected track (audio, video, subtitles) and even depending on the contents of the track only a subset of all the track specific options are availbale. The options are:

Global options

Starting the merge process

Saving and loading muxing settings


The chpater editor

Matroska's chapter concept

Examples

Chapter formats supported by mkvmerge

Simple/OGM style chapter files

Full-featured XML style chapter files

Chapters found in Matroska files

Creating chapter files

Editing existing chapters