Converting between MKV and MP4

Mattus · 5 Apr 2009 at 18:40

Bit of an obscure one, but worth a try - does anyone know how I can convert a Matroska (MKV) video to MP4 format? The MKV contains an x264 video track and AC3 audio.

The only stuff I've found online involves re-encoding the video stream itself, which I don't want to do. Since MKV and MP4 can both contain the x264 video, surely there's a way of copying the video directly from the MKV container to the MP4 without re-encoding the video stream and thus losing quality?

V4NT0M · 5 Apr 2009 at 18:57

It aint easy son, I looked at it before to convert stuff to be played on my xbox (have a feeling that's what you want to do) but there did not seem to be an easy way to do it and I gave up.

Diggsy · 5 Apr 2009 at 19:25

I've not personally tried it, but it appears that it can be done online here... http://media-convert.com/

I have used that site for iphone videos and it worked great, just takes a little while to upload, but the download speeds were very good.

Memphis · 5 Apr 2009 at 20:38

Easy as anything. GOTSent. Sorted.

aaron_yume · 5 Apr 2009 at 23:27

Try using a MP4Box Gui to mux the streams into the mp4 container as no re-encoding of the audio/video streams will be required then. YAMB (Yet Another MP4Box GUI) seems to be a good choice.

Mattus · 6 Apr 2009 at 16:57

Memphis said:
Easy as anything. GOTSent. Sorted.

Nice one - that did it admirably. Cheers

Diggsy said:
I've not personally tried it, but it appears that it can be done online here... http://media-convert.com/

Looks like it could be useful on the move, but unfortunately my source file was 500Mb!

aaron_yume said:
Try using a MP4Box Gui to mux the streams into the mp4 container as no re-encoding of the audio/video streams will be required then. YAMB (Yet Another MP4Box GUI) seems to be a good choice.

Thanks - in fact, I think that's what GOTSent did? It launched an MP4Box.exe, at any rate.

Mattus · 6 Apr 2009 at 17:58

Actually, spoke too soon. It always converts 5.1 audio streams to 2.0. I tried the PS3 (5.1) option but it didn't output anything. Any way round that?

CrayDeng · 7 Apr 2009 at 10:54

Mattus said:
Bit of an obscure one, but worth a try - does anyone know how I can convert a Matroska (MKV) video to MP4 format? The MKV contains an x264 video track and AC3 audio.

The only stuff I've found online involves re-encoding the video stream itself, which I don't want to do. Since MKV and MP4 can both contain the x264 video, surely there's a way of copying the video directly from the MKV container to the MP4 without re-encoding the video stream and thus losing quality?

I wonder does this MKV converter re-encoding the video or copy the video ?

Does that mean the re-encoding method will destory the quality and copy the video from container won't do that.

Thanks.

CrayDeng · 7 Apr 2009 at 10:55

BTW, I'm new here

Thanks for any help.

Mattus · 8 Apr 2009 at 02:05

That looks like it re-encodes the video.

The quality loss won't be that drastic, as you're encoding back into the same format. But there will be some loss - plus it's unnecessary and turns a five-minute job into an hour-long re-encode.