матрёшка / matroska

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As the matroska container is being widely used for content distribution today, especially for anime, but as there are still no standalone hardware player units in the market today which play MKV files, we receive a lot of requests on how to be able to convert MKV files into VCD/S-VCD or DVD files. This is generally speaking not an easy task, as the MKV container is the most powerful multimedia container today, offering support for a huge variety of different audio, video and subtitles formats in a single MKV file. As VCDs are limited to MPEG1 compression only, and S-VCDs and DVDs require MPEG2 compression at least for the video tracks, this conversion is only possible with a MPEG encoder.

While there are many MPEG encoders out there, the most well known probably being TMPG Encoder, most of them do not offer a suitable interface to read in MKV files, but are limited to AVI files. The tool being used here, DVD Santa 4.0, is however offering the possibility to read all kinds of video and audio files in, by using a powerful DirectShow reader plugin. DirectShow is a part of every modern Windows OS, and the underlying platform for video and audio playback in Windows Mediaplayer. In other words, the creators of DVD Santa have found a way to read all media files into their encoder, if they will play in Windows Mediaplayer. If you are being familiar with matroska already, and have read our Guide section a little bit, you may know already that we are offering a splitter filter for Microsoft DirectShow, allowing playback of matroska video and audio files (.mkv/.mka) in Windows Mediaplayer, as well as any other DirectShow based player (see our Windows Playback Guide section to learn which alternative players we are recommending). As the success of the conversion process is depending on playability of the MKV files in WMP, let do this first :

Step 1 : Installation of the matroska playback pack, to enable MKV/MKA playback in WMP

Goto http://www.cccp-project.net/ and download and install one of the playback packs. If you are having any video codec pack installed already, you may try the lite version of the matroska pack first, to avoid conflicts (unlikely, but possible). Only if your MKV file does still not play after installation of the lite pack, or if you dont have any other codec packs installed, go for the full pack instead.

Now open an Explorer window (not Internet Explorer, just Explorer) and search for the file 'mplayer2.exe' on your Windows drive (normally C:\\). By double clicking on the .exe file, you will start a very old, stable and lean version of Windows Mediaplayer, WMP 6.4. Most Pro's prefer to use this older version of Microsoft's player, as the more modern versions are typically overloaded with a lot of features, and are causing conflicts and other problems in many cases, especially with multimedia software that has not been developed by Microsoft themselves ;) ....

If the player is launched, goto 'file' 'open' and use the 'browse' function to point the player to your matroska file. It should play fine now, and we can proceed to the next step. If not, read the matroska playback Guides here and try to locate what the problem is.

Step 2 - Loading your matroska file into DVD Santa 4.0

After downloading and installing the free trial version of DVD Santa, you will see an opening dialogue like this :

But before we get started here, please take a moment to have a look at the DVD Santa short Guide on their homepage.
The right option to select is the one on the very left, named 'Video Files' . After pressing the button, here is what you will see :

The problem with current version of DVD Santa is still, that it has no clue what matroska files actually are, and so it will not recognize their extension, .mkv or .mka . This will become more than obvious to you when you will press the 'Add Media' button and the file opening dialogue will pop up :

By standard this dialogue is set to 'All Video and Audio files' and as DVD Santa does not recognize your .mkv/.mka files as what they are, audio and video files, they are not visible in the file list. To overcome this problem, set the 'file type' to 'All files "*.*" ' and voilá ...... here are your MKV files :

After clicking the file you like to convert and pressing 'open' (in the screenshot it's the German version of it, 'Öffnen'), here is how DVD Santa will look alike, with your MKV file ready for conversion :

Step 3 - The conversion process :

Now depending on where you like, you have to select the right Video Standard for your TV and DVD Player, typically NTSC for the US and PAL for most of the rest of the world. As most MKV files are of high video quality and resolution, i recommend to select 'High Resolution', as shown above. I haven't read the DVD Santa docs completely, so i don't know what will happen if you select 'Medium' or 'Low', but i expect that the result will then not be a DVD, but maybe a S-VCD (Medium : 352x576 PAL, 352 x 480 NTSC) or a VCD ( Low : 352 x 288 PAL, 352 x 240 NTSC). Therefore you will also have to go to 'Advanced Settings' and select a CD instead of a DVD as the target medium. Please note that some older DVD players can not play S-VCDs, while almost all will play VCDs also. For the aspect ratio setting, 'Wide Screen' is recommended for most cinema movies, while TV captures may work better in 'Full Screen' mode.

Then press 'Create DVD' and you will need some patience, because this is when the conversion process will start. Depending on your CPU power, the resolution of the picture (higher takes longer) and the length of the movie, this process can take up to 24 hours !After this rather long waiting, you'll see this screen :

and then, shortly after that, this screen :

The DVD is now ready to be burned, and you are not so far off from being able to watch your converted MKV file in the living room, with your DVD and TV. There is only the burning process to be made still :

This is it !!! Well done !!

Some more comments and suggestions :

DVD Santa Trial Version

The DVD Santa guys will offer a free version of their tool for free. However, the final DVD will have the very annoying words 'Demo Version' shown over the picture. There is probably no other way to get rid of this than by buying the full version of their software. However, in our opinion it is definitely worth the money (29,99- US$). The steps above should be done with the free Demo version, to make sure your MKV files can be converted into DVDs without problems.

matroska and the DVD Santa team - communication problems

Support for MKV files in DVD Santa is still far from being perfect. The most annoying thing is certainly the problem that MKV and MKA files don't show in the file opening dialogue, because their extensions are not in the list of 'Audio and Video files'. We tried several times now to make contact with the guys, but in vain. Personally i beleive our emails get stuck at some helper person who believes opensource is about bad hackers and world domination, but hopefully we will soon be able to talk to the right people.

There is still a lot of room for improvement, like support for embedded subtitles in MKV files and the possibility to select the right audio track, if the MKV file has more than one. Hopefully the matroska users will bring them some additonal bussiness, helping them to change their mind here, and making them work together with us for better matroska file support in their nice app.

More than one audio track in the MKV file

matroska is a very advanced container, and as such will offer support for an unlimited number of video, audio and subtitle tracks in a single file. In this case, if your preferred audio track is not the first and as long as there is no way to select the right audio track from the DVD Santa file opening dialogue, we have to use a little trick to make sure the final DVD will have the language we want it to have :

Goto http://mkvmerge.matroska.org and download and install the win32 Version of MKVtoolnix. Run the .exe file and the MKVtoolnix package will be installed on your computer. It will contain mkvmerge.exe, the most used MKV creation tool, and its GUI for Windows users, called mmg.exe. When you start the GUI, here is what you see :

mkvmerge has analyzed the MKV file, and will show you all the audio, video and subtitles tracks in it. Video tracks start with 'V_xxxx' , audio tracks (you guessed it) start with 'A_xxxx' and subtitles (what a surprise) with 'S_xxxx' . We will now untick all the unwanted audio and subtitles tracks, so for this example here we assume the audio we want is the track nr. 3 :

Now, you have to specify a new name for the file, and press 'Start Muxing' :

The result of the process, which is normally not taking longer than 2 minutes, will be a new MKV file, but with only the one audio track you want to hear in your DVD, after conversion in DVD Santa. Needless to say, this process has to be done BEFORE you start the conversion in DVD Santa. After you have removed the unwanted tracks, just load the new file into DVD Santa, just like described above.

Subtitles in DVD Santa

Many matroska files do contain subtitle tracks, or also called 'soft subs'. Unlike many AVI files floating around, when the subtitles were encoded with the main video and therefore became a fixed part of the movie, soft subs can be switched on or off, depending on if you like them or not, and you can also add subtitles for many different languages and then select the correct one for you on playback.

DVD Santa will allow you to burn your subs into the DVD, but only if those are available in SRT or SUB format (so-called text subtitles). matroska has support for SRT, but not for SUB. However, chances are high that the subs you will find in your MKV file are in SRT format. If they are in SSA/ASS or vobsub format, google for conversion tool into SRT format.

But first, we have to extract the subtitles track from the MKV file, so that you can load it into DVD Santa. The tool to do that is mkvextract.exe, and it is coming with the above mentioned MKVtoolnix package. As it is normally a CLI (command line) tool and we are lazy bastards and used to work with GUIs, we get the nice MKVextract GUI from our Spanish support team. Download the latest version here , extract the CONTENT of the ZIP file into the MKVtoolnix folder (mkvectractgui.exe will need a lot of apps and libraries from the mkvtoolnix folder, so it HAS to be in the same folder) and start the .exe file. The GUI will show :

Select the subtitles track you want to convert with your DVD, specify a name and the right output folder (typically the 'Source Folder' ) and press 'Extract'. The following process is very quick, typically less than 1 minute. The result will be a subtitles file with the extension .SRT (best case), .SSA or you will have two files even, a .SUB and a .IDX file. The latter two are DVD style picture type subtitles called 'vobsub' . Unfortunately DVD Santa can't handle them (DVD Maestro can, but cant read MKV files), so you have to convert them into text based SRT subtitles with tools like vobsub . Make sure that when you install vobsub, DO NOT install the DVobSub subtitle filter with it !! Deinstall the tick box in the install configuration window in any case, as this filter is old and will conflict with newer versions of vsfilter (its successor). For SSA files, i dont know which tool could be used to convert them to SRT, try Sub Station Alpha or U96.

Once you have a SRT file, you have to load it right after Step 2 above, before the actual conversion will start :

Then, after you can see the subtitles track in the list, proceed with the conversion (Step 3) just like above. If all is right, the subtitles should become visible with the final VCD/S-VCD/DVD.

Do us a favour

This method described above works fine for a big number of files. However, if it doesnt work for you, help us to improve on it. To do so, do the following :

• run matroskadiag.exe , the matroska file diagnostics program, on your MKV file
• send the log file of the diagnosis run via email to matroska-users@lists.matroska.org and describe your problem with DVD Santa

If you like DVD Santa and use it a lot for converting your MKV files, please tell it to the DVD Santa people ! The email is

Comments@dvdsanta.com

please use the following text :

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