.TH MKVMERGE "1" "April 2003" "mkvmerge v0.5.0" "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 \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. The numbers are track IDs which can be obtained with the \fB\-\-identify\fR switch. They're \fBnot\fR simply the track numbers (see section \fBTRACK IDS\fR). 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. The numbers are track IDs which can be obtained with the \fB\-\-identify\fR switch (see section \fBTRACK IDS\fR). They're \fBnot\fR simply the track numbers. 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. The numbers are track IDs which can be obtained with the \fB\-\-identify\fR switch (see section \fBTRACK IDS\fR). They're \fBnot\fR simply the track numbers. 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 <\fITID\fR:\fId\fR[,\fIo\fR[/\fIp\fR]]> Synchronize manually, delay the audio track with the id \fITID\fR by \fId\fR ms. The track IDs are the same as the ones given with \fB\-\-identify\fR (see section \fBTRACK IDS\fR). .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 <\fITID\fR:\fInone\fR|\fIiframes\fR|\fIall\fR> Controls for which tracks cue (index) entries are created for the given track (see section \fBTRACK IDS\fR). \fInone\fR inhibits the creation of cue entries. 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 <\fITID\fR> Sets the 'default' flag for the given track (see section \fBTRACK IDS\fR). 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 <\fITID\fR:\fIlanguage\fR> Sets the language for the given track (see section \fBTRACK IDS\fR). 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 <\fIcharset\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\-i\fR, \fB\-\-identify\fR <\fIfilename\fR> Will let mkvmerge probe the single file and report its type, the tracks contained in the file and their track IDs. If this option is used then the only other option allowed is the filename. .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. First find out which track ID the Vorbis track has with .LP $ \fBmkvmerge --identify outofsync.ogg\fP .LP Now you can use that ID in the following command line: .LP $ \fBmkvmerge -o goodsync.mkv -A source.avi -s 12345:200 outofsync.ogg\fP .LP This would add 200ms of silence at the beginning of the audio track with the ID 12345 taken from \fIoutofsync.ogg\fP. .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 23456:0,77346/77340 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 must 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. .LP \fBmkvmerge\fR does this conversion automatically based on the system's current locale. 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 TRACK IDS .LP Some of the options for \fBmkvmerge\fR need a track ID to specify which track they should be applied to. Those track IDs are printed by the readers when demuxing the current input file, or if \fBmkvmerge\fR is called with the \fB\-\-identify\fR option. Track IDs are assigned like this: .TP * AVI files: The video track has the ID 0. All audio tracks get the ID 1, 2... .TP * AAC, AC3, MP3, SRT and WAV files: The one 'track' in that file gets the ID 0. .TP * Ogg/OGM files: The track's ID is its serial number as given in the Ogg stream header page. .TP * Matroska files: The track's ID is the track number as reported by \fBmkvinfo\fR or \fBmkvmerge \-\-identify\fR. It is \fBnot\fR the track UID. .LP The special track ID '-1' is a wildcard and applies the given switch to all tracks that are read from an input file. This was the bahviour of these switches prior to version 0.5.0. .LP The options that use the track IDs are: \fB\-\-atracks\fR, \fB\-\-vtracks\fR, \fB\-\-stracks\fR, \fB\-\-sync\fR, \fB\-\-default-track\fR, \fB\-\-cues\fR and \fB\-\-language\fR. .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 . .SH SEE ALSO .BR mkvinfo (1) .SH WWW The newest version can always be found at .UR http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/ .UE