A guide to mkvmerge GUI

MKVToolnix is a set of tools to create, alter and inspect Matroska files under Linux, other Unices and Windows. They do for Matroska what the OGMtools do for the OGM format and then some.

A guide to mkvmerge GUI (mmg)

Moritz Bunkus

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Table of contents

1. Introduction
   
   1. What is Matroska?
   2. What is mkvmerge? What is mkvmerge GUI?
   3. Obtaining the latest version
   4. Scope of this guide
2. Setting up mkvmerge GUI
3. Creating Matroska files
   
   1. Basics
   2. Options for input files
   3. Options for each track
   4. Attachments
   5. Global options
      
      1. File/segment title
      2. Automatic splitting and file linking
      3. Manual file/segment linking
      4. Chapters
      5. Global tags
   6. Starting the merge process
   7. Saving and loading muxing settings
   8. Queueing several jobs
4. The chapter editor
   
   1. Matroska's chapter concept
   2. Examples
   3. Chapter formats supported by mkvmerge
      
      1. Simple/OGM style chapter files
      2. Full-featured XML style chapter files
      3. Chapters found in Matroska files
   4. Creating chapter files
   5. Editing existing chapters
5. The header editor
   
   1. Adding and removing header fields
   2. Opening an existing file
   3. Editing header fields
   4. Validation
   5. Saving the file

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1. Introduction

1.1. 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.

1.2. 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.

1.3. 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.

1.4. Scope of this guide

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

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2. 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.)

Figure 1: Use this button to select the path to the mkvmerge program.

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.

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3. Creating Matroska files

3.1. 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.

Read more...
http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/doc/mkvmerge-gui.html#whatismatroska

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