Question: Comfortable solution to recode MKV files with h264 ?

Darksoul71 · 2010-09-28 13:11:28

Hi all,

I am getting HDTV satellite streams from a friend of mine. He mostly simply edits out any commercials, cuts front / end and remuxes the stream as MKV. Since he stores those movies on a NAS he doesn't care about size. My main target is a standard dual-layer DVD-R. Hence I am targeting 7.5GB.

Currently I demux the MKV file, calculate the bitrate required to meet my target size, recode the h264 stream with ffmpeg and remux the MKV file with the resulting shrinked stream.

Is there a "simple to use" tool available on arch to do the job ?
For Windows there are quite a few tools (e.g. AutoMKV, Ripbot) to do this quite comfortable. Under arch I know handbrake (which provides me a bit too much options), WinFF and avidemux for encoding videos. Avidemux would be nice to do so but it is only capable to use one audio stream and sometime the handling of h264 streams is pretty flakey (e.g. dropped frames, async AV, green frames).

The optimal solution would be a tool which lets me select a list of n MKV files, specify the output size of the final MKV and solely re-encodes the h264 stream while keeping the rest of the streams (audio, chapters, subtitles).

While I think that I would be able to hack together a perl or python script to do the job I would prefer a "finished" solution.

Any ideas on this one ?

TIA,
D$

Last edited by Darksoul71 (2010-09-28 13:48:58)

karol · 2010-09-28 13:24:50

Sorry, misread your post.

Last edited by karol (2010-09-28 13:25:47)

Army · 2010-09-28 16:39:17

Hm, well, I guess this could work with h264enc (in AUR). It's a bash script which asks you what you want and then encodes the files according to your selections. The cool thing is, it provides a possibility to save the created script which in the end does all the encoding and remuxing etc. It seems like your source files are basically the same every time, right? So it should be possible to encode and mux them all with the same script.

Give it a try, maybe it's really the solution closest to "finished".

Darksoul71 · 2010-09-29 20:17:06

Thanks for pointing out h264enc.
I've analysed the script a bit today and it is really a pretty complex bash script.
Unfortunately it's way too oversized for my purposes. May be I use it as base for my own bash script. Hm...
I outlined automated demuxing of the mkv file and resize of the h264 video track today but this still is not "perfect"

Arch Linux

#1 2010-09-28 13:11:28

Question: Comfortable solution to recode MKV files with h264 ?

#2 2010-09-28 13:24:50

Re: Question: Comfortable solution to recode MKV files with h264 ?

#3 2010-09-28 16:39:17

Re: Question: Comfortable solution to recode MKV files with h264 ?

#4 2010-09-29 20:17:06

Re: Question: Comfortable solution to recode MKV files with h264 ?

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