Converting MKV to AVI [SOLVED?]

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Sat, 2010-05-08 at 01:38 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> The MKV files are for standard NTSC or PAL broadcast TV (not even HD
> in
> most cases, though they could be). I've so far been unsuccessful in
> hitting reasonable combination of options for producing a useful
> result.
> I've tried ffmpeg, transcode and mencode, but the resulting videos
> tend
> to have have noticeable blocking artefacts (despite playing with
> bitrates) and severe sound synch problems.

The blocking artefacts are clearly a matter of fiddling with bitrates,
so no problem. It was the sound synch that was really confusing me. I
finally tracked down this discussion:

https://roundup.ffmpeg.org/issue1756

which has some interesting things to say about the error message I
already remarked on: "... codec frame rate differs from container frame
rate ...". It's a problem with Matroska files.

The solution was to build a new version of ffmpeg from SVN. That solves
the synch problem and the rest is just a matter of playing with the
settings.

Thanks to all who offered advice, especially Sean Darcy
<seandarcy2 at gmail.com>. Here's hoping a fixed version of ffmpeg makes it
into F13 (or even F12 updates).

poc