Monday Mac App Toolbox: MKVTools

MKV, or Mastroka Video, is a pain for Mac users.
Although the adoption of it has merit :
open-source, ability to contain within it
HD (High Definition) Video and Audio, as well
as subtitles, it is often a piece of work to get it
into a usuable format if you want to use part of it
in an Final Cut Pro or iMovie sequence.
Tried and true converters such as MpegStreamclip
and Quicktime Player often choke
( even with Perian installed on the system),
usually on trying to decode everything that is in the container,
instead of just focusing on what is needed.

Rather than go through the hassle of trying to use MKV as it is,
I find that I'd rather get the video into a format that I use,
and then go from there. To facilitate that, I often turn to
MKVTools.

MKVTools is developed by my good friend
emmgunn, enables you to drag and drop a MKV file onto it,
and from there, you are presented with options to flatten the
file down by embedding subtitles, and even
transcoding the file into another format,
such as XVID for video and mp3 for audio.

This is what I tend to do, by transcoding it to another file,
I get it into a more compatible format like XVID
and the audio into mp3, which makes it less labor
intensive to decode and enable playback in
Quicktime and MpegStreamclip ( but not VLC,
which handles mkvs much easier for playback, but not editing).

Once it is in an .avi container ( or .mp4),
I can then open this file in MpegStreamclip,
and scrub through it pretty easily, getting the
pieces I want here or there, and exporting them
from there to DV stream, for ingestion into iMovie,
FCE or FCP.

Or if I happen to have a file that I'd rather just be able to watch
at my leisure, I'll keep the .avi ( or .mp4) file that is generated
by MKVTools, and watch that on my HTMac, or encode it
for direct watching on my iPod ( or an Apple TV).

It is the #1 tool I turn to for getting mkv files into easier
to handle formats.
But what if you have an .mkv that is stubborn and chokes
MKVTools ability to transcode it into something useful?

Tune in to tomorrow's Tech Tip Tuesday, where I'll talk about
two ways to get around heavy problem mkv's to get something
useful for your video productions.