Converting MKV to AVI

sean darcy seandarcy2 at gmail.com
Sat May 8 14:00:57 UTC 2010


Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> I occasionally need to convert Matroska videos to a format my
> stand-alone player (an LG DVD unit) can play. I don't need to author
> DVDs since the player can read from a pendrive via a USB port, but it's
> fairly limited in the formats it will accept. Xvid seems to work well so
> it's what I tend to use.
> 
> 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. Here's a random example of
> the kind of thing I've been trying:
> 
> mencoder example.mkv -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=1000:profile=dxnhtntsc:quant_type=mpeg -vf scale=720:480 -o output.avi
> 
> I've also messed a little with the mkv* tools, but they appear to assume
> a familiarity with Matroska terminology which I would prefer not to have
> to acquire.
> 
> <rant>
> Part of the problem is that all the above tools are clearly aimed at
> people who know what they're doing. Those of us uninterested in a career
> in multimedia technology are liable to be completely lost when
> struggling with any of the (incomplete and ambiguous) manuals, not to
> mention the baroque syntax of the command-line options. Why are there no
> "multimedia conversion for dummies" tools in Linux as there are in
> Windoze?
> </rant>
> 
> Anyway, my question is this: does anyone have a useful recipe for this
> kind of thing?
> 
> And for extra credit: how about converting FLV (Flash video)?
> 
> poc
> 

First, I agree with your rant. What the world needs is a media recipe wiki.

But I'd try again with ffmpeg. It has the most active development and 
user group. The helpful users make up for the lousy docs.

1. Do you have a very recent version of ffmpeg? I'd urge you to use svn, 
but at least 0.5.1.

2. ffmpeg -i source.mkv -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.avi , should 
work if source mkv is in mpeg-4 and mp3.

3. If not, run ffmpeg -i source.mkv and post to the ffmpeg user list.

Good luck.

sean



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