what's the best way to do this?

I have MKVtoolnix... but the extract exe just closes when I open it. So before I go messing with that anymore is there another way to extract the files? Playing the mkv is not good enough, i want the files inside. I could get the files in something other than mkv, but it wouldn't hurt to know how to do this.

The mkv has one video file (x264) and one audio (ac3)

Once I have the audio and video files I'll be good to go.

9/19/2007 5:46:25 PM

Oh wow. The video and audio streams are not stored as stand-alone objects ("files") in the MKV. MKV, like OGG and AVI, is a wrapper that tells a video player how to read the audio and video streams it holds. You can't just "extract" the video stream as raw data without any kind of header. It wouldn't mean anything.

From the name of it (MKVtoolnix) it sounds like you may be running linux. If not, try VirtualDub (or virtualdubmod). There are MKV and OGG extensions available to support multiple audio and video streams. VirtualDub will allow you to perform a direct stream copy of audio and video data from one container format to another (i.e. you can convert your MKV to AVI, which most DVD authoring software supports).

Or... you could use a program called graphedit (if you don't know what a graph is in this context, don't bother) to render the MKV directly to an AVI file or use some video filter to transcode it in the process.

Just my $0.02, YMMV.

9/19/2007 6:09:34 PM

hmmm, sorry for my wording.

I can open it in MKVtoolnix and see that it is made up of mp4 video and ac3 audio. And it has a command prompt tool which will let you extract the streams to other formats (avi, mp3, etc.). But whenever i try to open this it just closes. Sorry for not explaining that better, it seemed like the MKVtoolnix was a popular program in dealing with mkv files in the way that virtualdub is popular when dealing with video and audio in general. Thinking that, I thought that anyone who knew the answer to my question would know the program. bad assumption on my part.

My hope was to extract the streams to stand alone formats and put them back together with Virtualdub as an avi.

From what i've read virtualdub doesn't support mkv files. So I figured I'd utilize tww as a resource before I got virtualdubmod or put time into it just to find I'd be better off getting it in another format to begin with.

I'll see if I can run it through virtualdub. Just tried and virtualdub doesn't recognize mkv files. I'll try virtualdubmod unless anyone has other suggestions.

[Edited on September 19, 2007 at 9:10 PM. Reason : .]

9/19/2007 9:02:00 PM

VirtualDub as released by the original authors do not. There are versions where support for MKV and OGG was added and it was recompiled. I used to use it to convert MKV to OGG, so I know it's out there.

9/19/2007 11:26:48 PM

how is it you have a mkv file in the first place that you are converting to DVD?

post the file and someone can convert it for you or at least look at it

9/19/2007 11:49:12 PM

It's some crap a friend made and asked me to burn it to dvd for him. No clue as to why or how it got it saved as mkv. But I used Virtualdubmod and it worked fine.

9/20/2007 6:01:45 AM