If it helps, .mkv is a video/audio container like Windows .avi & Apple's Quicktime .mov. It's popular as a container format that can hold more kinds of content than just one video & one audio track like .avi. That said, while it is popular [you'll find lots of content in .mkv on-line, & see plenty of references to the format], it's I guess you could say "Home Grown", meaning it wasn't developed by some company (or group of allied companies) so most apps & players, particularly commercial ones, won't recognize or handle .mkv at all.

Because it's just a container there are tools to strip out the content [demux] &/or put that content inside a regular .avi file to make it easier to work with [see the Tools page at videohelp.com] -- many [most?] are based on &/or are a front end for mkvtoolnix... One that I like is MKVcleaver simply because it works without problems for me, which many of these sorts of apps don't. [Please note however that when creating .avi files with a content format like .h264 it will create however many 2 GB .avi files rather than a single large one -- VirtualDubMod does a good job of putting them together using "Direct stream copy", writing a new .avi file without doing any encoding or altering the video at all... that step takes as long as it takes to copy all the files on your PC/laptop from one place to another, since that's all it's really doing.]

Of course it's both easier & quicker if you can skip those steps altogether & just use .mkv files as-is... mediAvatar MKV Converter is a video converter [like you're used to seeing] that does just that. Having just downloaded it I can't say more about it than that.

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Changing topics slightly, the mediAvatar folks heavily advertise their use & support of CUDA to make conversions go faster by using NVIDIA GPUs to do some of the number crunching alongside your PC's/laptop's CPU. Often with other video apps that support CUDA you'll read quite a range of user reports, from complaints that things actually move slower to claims of lightning fast speeds. If you've got NVIDIA graphics hardware, & if you want to find out if [or make sure] it's being used, there's a handy [& free] utility called GPU-Z http://goo.gl/j9R8 that will show you -- just fire this small, one file app up, go to the "Sensors" tab, & make sure the box is checked for "Continue refreshing...", then start up mediAvatar MKV Converter & do a test, watching GPU-Z to see what happens [similar to the way you'd check the performance graph in Task Mgr. for your CPU].

mike  –  13 years ago  –  Vond je deze reactie nuttig? ja | nee (+76)

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Not a bad piece of software, though it's merely the fact that it actually converts well that sets it apart from most of the competition.

Output from .mkv to .xvid looked as good coming out as going in.

However, it is my opinion that without the ability to add subtitles (.srt and .ssa etc) any mkv converter is pointless.

Btw, while this application does indeed utilize CUDA to expedite conversions, it is not requisite.

Format Factory does all this does and more for free, every day.

Win 7 Pro 64bit
HD-5770

Drakman  –  13 years ago  –  Vond je deze reactie nuttig? ja | nee (+41)

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mediAvatar MKV Converter is a one trick pony that is slightly more difficult to use, & *compared to older video converters* slightly faster than average -- ffmpeg-based converters have been moving to QT programing for sometimes surprising speed increases, but while MKV Converter is faster [I assume] from using QT, it's not faster by much. mediAvatar MKV Converter imports, & *only* imports .mkv files -- the media formats inside a .mkv file that it'll work with depend at least partly on what you have installed in Windows... it would not work with a VC1 .mkv file in win7 64, but installed to a XP Pro VM with a different ffdshow configuration it would transcode the same file [ffdshow is a (sometimes troublesome) multiple codec setup]. Advanced settings are available in an extended window, & that's where you can set duration to trim a video clip before transcoding -- it was a bit of a PITA in practice, & manually setting the output frame size [to 854x480 for Droid] in that same window resulted in a pillar-boxed video [it looked good, but the 16:9 picture was shrunken]. All 4 cores were used, but cpu use hovered ~58 % -- got 100% in the VM, but that's not saying too much. While it does include a Help file, it doesn't always match the application.

I personally wasn't impressed installing mediAvatar MKV Converter, but that's me -- I look at it the same way I do grocery shopping, comparing store brands to the big name ones, deciding if the benefits are worth the extra cost. Those are pretty much individual, subjective decisions, whether I'm talking about software or a can of beans -- installing software, how much you're willing to pay has a lot to do with how much you really need an app's capabilities. In this case the benefits are being able to directly convert .mkv files, mostly to smaller hand-held or cell phone sizes, & the costs are a IMHO more complicated than necessary setup, accompanied by a program folder with 1360 files, 59 folders, taking up ~87 MB [& that's without the optional Real Media codec support -- you're given the option during setup]. Setup includes "vcredist_x86.exe from Microsoft [2008 C++ runtime redistributable], which adds several files & folders to Windows\ WinSxS\ & quite a few registry entries -- monitor setup in win7 [e.g. using Regshot or Regshot2] & you may be surpised by ~61k new entries... BTW that HKLM\Schema key with most all of them will not be there after re-boot. Setup has a file [msvcr71.dll] for Windows' system folder, & adds folders to All Users\ Application Data & User\ Application Data in XP, while in win7 they're added to User\ AppData\ Roaming & All Users\. That covered, mediAvatar MKV Converter appears to need [& run well with] 2 main registry keys, [for me & IMHO] putting the 550 new registry entries recorded in XP somewhat in perspective.

In the end, despite getting mediAvatar MKV Converter up & running well with just the 2 new keys in the registry, I didn't see anything to justify keeping it around. I don't do many .mkv conversions to held-held or cell phone formats, so it would have to do something out of the ordinary &/or accept more than .mkv. As far as I can tell it doesn't, nor does it have an awful lot of profiles, & while what's there is customizable, it was a bit of a pain making those settings as the text boxes didn't behave as I'd expect. OTOH if you really need .mkv to hand-held or cell support & don't have any good tools to do that right now, you could do far worse than mediAvatar MKV Converter, with what I consider warts & all. If you already have a decent toolkit & just need .mkv support, look at the tools to get content out of .mkv & into something else like .avi at videohelp.com -- they also have tools like XMedia Recode that'll accept .mkv.

mike  –  13 years ago  –  Vond je deze reactie nuttig? ja | nee (+19)

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While it might be nice, MY preference is to go TO MKV, not FROM. ALSO... Please note... the CUDA software REQUIRES an NVIdia card. Pass, for me.

Lou2  –  13 years ago  –  Vond je deze reactie nuttig? ja | nee (+16)

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#4: "I am much more interested in a way to convert other HD formats to mkv."

Check the videohelp.com Tools page -- categories like "Blu-ray to AVI/MKV/MP4", "All In One MKV to MP4/AVCHD/TS", &/or "All In One Video Converters" might give you a jump-start.

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#10: "It makes logically no sense to go from other from other formats to mkv. Since mkv is mostly used for higher resolution recordings; you would end up encoding non-exsistent data into a higher resolution file; ending up with alot of artifacts. "

As .mkv is a container you ideally should be able to move your content into whatever other container without re-encoding so no loss of quality, & vice versa. IOW if your app or method calls for re-encoding, look for another. ;-) As far as rez goes, .mkv works equally well I think holding HD as it does with std. YouTube -- that's not to say one tool or another won't insist on re-sampling up or down. You can find info here http://goo.gl/FhBfG & here http://goo.gl/Zx7e

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#15: "#11 mike, AVI can contain as many audio channels as you like to add... You can add more audio streams to an AVI file manually using virtualdubmod!"

You're right -- it's just not universally accepted by software. I think a lot of those sorts of things died down a bit when .mkv started becoming more popular [e.g. why stuff an even somewhat non-std avi when there's mkv] -- the latest VirtualDubMod (last I looked) is dated 2/21/06. WinMedia Audio looked promising for multi-channel, just like the MS tool for audio-only .avi files, but personally never saw really widespread use of either develop. In the mean time there were all these projects adding capabilities so that you could use formats like DivX & Matroska & have DVD features without the DVD. IMHO it boils down to being not so much about whether they're better or worse than .avi, but what the specialized players that could do all that stuff were designed to work with.

Now I think a lot of companies didn't like Matroska because some company didn't own it, there was not this licensing board etc... FWIW that seems to be changing. Another hurtle to or for .mkv is the often needed splitter, & popular implementations haven't always been trouble free.

At any rate, whether you use .mov or .avi or .mkv [&/or a host of others like.m2ts, .mp4 etc.] they're all just containers, & support in any app is a matter of what the devs decided to support in their app(s). If an app or device works with whatever you've got as-is, great. When it doesn't you either transfer the contents to something else that does work, or use another app/device.

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#16: "... if you don’t have an Nvidia card in your computer, is the output of lesser quality than if you do, or is it just a matter of speed in processing?"

Speed processing... it can be like adding extra processing power to your CPU. Far as quality goes, **Depending** on the extra code, it can sometimes hurt quality, if/when the dev was mainly interested in increasing speed & took a shortcut or three. That goes for NVIDIA or ATI graphics.

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#19: "... is ‘Format Factory’ as good as #7 says and will it do what mediAvatar MKV Converter will do? IF anyone can/will answer this, I’d appreciate it. "

Check out the comments on it at videohelp.com, & optionally check their forums too. Lots of folks like it -- I don't, but that's me & my likes/wants aren't the same as everyone else, so see what others have had to say.

mike  –  13 years ago  –  Vond je deze reactie nuttig? ja | nee (+11)

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