[Help - Software] MKV to other formats

[Jamie Hall]

Does anyone out there know how to convert MKV files to WMA without losing the english dubbing. I tried useing divx but big mistake it just loads ur pc with spyware. any other suggestion?:unsure:

[blueangel06661]

^^^ Never had a problem with divx.. But go look into the stuff RealPlayer puts out.

[Jamie Hall]

when i use realplayer to convert it it makes the sound track japanese and gives me no subtitles?

[demonix]

Does anyone out there know how to convert MKV files to WMA without losing the english dubbing. I tried useing divx but big mistake it just loads ur pc with spyware. any other suggestion?:unsure:
I'm guessing that is either a typo or you didn't know that WMA is a audio only container (WMA meaning Windows Media Audio) where WMV is the audio/video version of that container (WMV meaning Windows Media Video) although I don't know why you would want to ruin a perfectly good video by converting it to a lesser format.

[Gjallarhorn]

It's a real pain to do, but I have a process to get a .avi out of them. I'm not sure why you'd use a .wmv for anything...it's a horrible format all around.

A .mkv file is a container that holds other files in it; the actual video, audio, and subtitle files therein could be of many different formats. Typical video stream formats are in .avi or .mp4, while audio is usually .mp3 or .aac. I'm going ahead and assuming the video steam is in AVI format, and the audio format is in .mp3. I'll add a section at the end for dealing with .mp4 and .aac.

What you'll need:
CCCP
LameMP3
MKVExtract (with gui)
Mediainfo
Aegisub (and google a file called "VSfilter-Aegisub.dll", and put it in the "Program Files/Aegisub/csri" folder once you've installed Aegisub)
AviSynth
avc2avi (with gui)
Foobar2000
VirtualDub

First, make sure you have CCCP installed. K-Lite Codex Pack works as well, I just prefer CCCP. It's the first result on Google, just download and install with the basic set-up and associations.

After that, go ahead and install everything else I've listed.

Now, run the MKVextract gui, and add in your open your .mkv file with it. Give it a second and it will load a list of all video, audio, and subtitle streams, as well as a chapters list in a .txt file if the .mkv has chapters in it.

Select your video stream, the audio stream you want, and the subtitle stream you want. Choose a destination folder, and hit "Extract". After a few minutes, the individual files will appear in your destination folder.

Now, we need to deal with these files.

If your video is an H264 file, open the avc2avi gui. It will require a framerate for you video, so you need to use Mediainfo to select the file and it will tell you its framerate. Once you've got it, select the file with avc2avi, add the framerate in the designated box, and then let the progam do its thing. After a few minutes you'll have a nice, shiny AVI file.

If your video is an avi file already, don't do anything with it yet.

If your video is an mp4 file, scroll down to the very bottom of this post to find out what to do, and then come back to here.

If your audio file is a .aac file, you'll need to get it to .mp3. For this, you'll need Foobar2000. Simply put your .aac file into Foobar2000, right click it, and select "Convert To". If you hit "options" or "advanced" (I forget exactly what the button says), you can select your MP3 profile. I'd recommend the audio bitrate be 320kb/s for the best quality but higher file size, or 192kb/s for average quality and lower file size. Once you've done your profile, begin the conversion.

Now you have the files in the formats you need; we just need to put them together into one file. This is where AviSynth and VirtualDub come in.

First, we need a .avs file. Open up notepad, and enter the following (note: my computer is set up with a Japanese syslocale, so the yen symbols should be backslashes):

LoadPlugin("c:\program files\aegisub\csri\VSFilter-Aegisub.dll")
AviSource("Location of your .avi file")
TextSub("Location of your subtitle file, usually a .srt or .ass file")

For example, this is a .avs file I have:

LoadPlugin("c:\program files\aegisub\csri\VSFilter-Aegisub.dll")
AviSource("C:\Users\Kyle\desktop\jpopxfile.avi")
TextSub("c:\users\kyle\desktop\jpopxfile.as")

You can copy and paste the location of your file by right clicking the file, going to "Properties", and going to the "security" tab. The top line has the file location in it; if you can't see the whole line, don't worry - it will scroll as you highlight it. Anyway, copy and paste them into the AviSource and TextSub lines in Notepad.

Now, there's some special conditions to saving this file from Notepad. First, make sure the "encoding" tab says ANSI. Then, after you name the file, add ".avs". For example "Yourfilename.avs".

Now open up VirtualDub, and drag and drop your .avs file into it. If all goes well, two panels will show up. Drag the slider a bit to make sure the video and subtitles are there. Now go to the "Audio" tab, and choose "Audio from file". Select the mp3. Now go to the "Video" tab, select "compression", and select the mode of compression you want. This just select the compression codec you're going to use. I'd recommend Xvid or DivX codecs, or ffdshow might show up if you have it, or mpeg layer 4 (mpg4). Any of these will do, just make sure you select something otherwise you'll get a massive, uncompressed file (typically 2-4GB). After you've done that, go to "file", "save as AVI...", and save the avi file.

Now you're all set.



Now, if the MKVextract gui gives you a .mp4 file, you'll need a program called Pazera Free MP4 to AVI converter. But we aren't going to do this in a direct process. First you'll open up you .mp4 file with it. Leave everything as is, except change the "video codec" bar to "HuffYUV (lossless)". Hit "convert". This is going to create a very large .avi file. Now open this file in VirtualDub, go to "video", "compression", and choose your compression option (see the last paragraph above this). Once you've chosen your compression method, go to "file", "Save as AVI", and let it doing it's thing. Once that's done you can continue with the steps above.