A week or so ago I had a brief exchange with Glynor in another thread about the mkv more advanced features. He had a very good point that it's downright complicated to use these more exotic features of the mkv container. So I thought it would be good to outline what's doable now (as in Mid 2011) with mkv, preferably without frying one's brain (what follows it's probably common knowledge for the Doom9 people, I'm writing for the less savvy readers of Doom9, who may develop an interest).
1) What's the need?
Maybe you've heard that besides the audio and video, mkv allows embedding subtitles, fonts for the said subtitles (so they always get displayed as intended even if the required font is not installed as a system font), covers, allow for ordered chapters (that can refer a position in an external file, not the one you're currently playing), seamless branching (link different physical files together) and other fancy stuff like that. If you haven't heard, now you know. The degree this specs are implemented/supported varies wildly.
So let's assume that you are not part of the anime fansub scene (where some of these features are very popular). Why would you need any of these things? I'll give you a couple of recent and well known examples.
You take the movie Salt on Blu-ray. It has 3 versions, the Theatrical, the Director's Cut and the Extended Cut. The are significant differences between the 3 versions, so much so that they have different endings than the Theatrical version. So what are you gonna do if you want all 3? Rip them separately? You'll end up with 100GB of rips from one 40GB Blu-Ray since you're re-ripping most of the sequences every time you create an alternate version.
But maybe Salt is not your type of movie. Meh, Salt... Whatever. But then there's Once Upon A Time In The West with Theatrical and Restored version. And there's Alien, Aliens, Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection each with extended cuts and with separate commentaries for each cut. Do you keep on ripping separate versions? I know that HDD space is cheap today but that's not a reason to go overboard. For me, tidy, clean and efficient always wins.
2) What's the fix?
The fix is you do ordered chapters and seamless branching within an MKV file. If we take Salt as an example you add to the original ~31GB rip another 5-7GB (from memory, I might me slightly wrong) and that's it, you have all 3 versions in one file. Compare that with 100GB+ to have separate rips.
Oh, cool! Do you have to work 3 days and 3 nights to get that done? No. I admit is not as simple as ripping a disk with MakeMKV but it's far less complicated that one might think.
I use
Xin1Generator (screenshot from the official site below) to create the proper rips. In Xin1 you indicate the versions of the movie you want to save and the program will output a video stream, an audio stream (or more), subtitles streams, a chapters file and a tags file. Then you take the video, audio and subs and throw them into MKVMerge (part of
mkvtoolnix), load the already made chapters, add the tags file and press mux. Done!
The resulting file, if you did everything right, will have each "cut" of the movie as an Edition, and you can switch between them as you like.
3) Requirements and MC status.
There is one big requirement: you need Haali splitter for such an MKV to work properly. If you use other splitter the file will still play but what you get is whatever is in the first Edition (first "cut" of the movie) with the added parts stuffed at the end, giving the file an unnatural time length. Maybe more splitters (LAV?) will support these features, who knows.
Now, on the MC status
, that's a bit in the middle of all things. If you use Haali with MC (as you can surely do) it will pick the first edition and play it, correct length and all. But, as MC does not expose the advanced properties available through the Halli splitter one has no way to switch edition/cuts. Maybe the devs can take a look and add support for the said features. (note: you can still probably switch streams by using the splitters icon on the taskbar, if enabled; haven't tried that route and it's nowhere near as elegant as built-in support). As tested with MC 16, the advance options in Haali splitter are offered through the Stream selection menu entry, allowing for easy switching between the embedded Editions (thanks audunth for pointing it out). Subs and chapters are also present.
4) On a number of various other issues.
If you really want to read more about mkv - in a nice, from simple to complex way - read
101 things you never knew you could do with Matroska.
For the people that backup Blu-ray to ISOs or to complete folder structure. This is more of a subjective nature and, far from trying to say that my approach is best, I'll just simply say that I don't see the purpose of backing up the entire discs.
- it'll consume more space, but some will say that HDDs are cheap today. True but most people don't have 20 2TB HD lying around, they might have 2, maybe 3 and you do know that there is never enough free space.
- what are you trying to preserve with the whole disc? The "experience"? Well the movie is the experience, not the menus. Preserve the extras? True, it's a very understandable option but there are much more tight ways to preserve them in mkv, without convoluted navigation
- I don't understand (but that's just me) the need for menus. Bottom line, do you want to be called a criminal in 5 languages, watch 10 forced trailers (skip 'em if you can) and then navigate through Java menus that actually take time to load themselves?? I favor one-click-play. Two clicks play an extra.
If you really can't live without the additional fluff put on the discs, because that fluff actually gives time to your family to gather around the TV from the initial shout out "Heeey! the movie is starting!!", maybe we can investigate adding extra content that we
want - trailers we want, galleries related to movies that we want and some other - oh! relational - stuff. As in forward thinking and not preserving a disc structure that gets in the way.
- still going at it from the menu's perspective, what are the expectations? That you can use the Blu-ray menu's someday? If I understand right nevcairiel said that he intends to add Blu-Ray navigation to his splitter. I would like to hear some clarification as to how such a feature will work when it will work. Allow to make the choices the Blu-ray menu presents, from the splitter perspective (choose the version of the movie, sound track, commentaries, extras), but it will not be like an entire BD-Java VM running the menus, correct? If that is the case, backing up the entire disc structure makes even less sense, 'cause you will never get to see the menus.
So there you have it. More screenshots later if it helps.
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Topic: What can be done with MKV today (Read 9118 times)