CODEC Converter

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

I have the KLite codec pack installed but have a missing codec.

What I am trying to do is convert a video file from a .mkv to something that I can more easily use. Any recommendations welcome.

[Bob]

John,

".mkv" is a container format, not a codec. You can read about it here: http://www.matroska.org/index.html. Like other container formats, it can contain different streams each with it's own codec. The Matroska people feel their container is the end all of container formats and don't provide much in the way of conversion tools. Matroska is pretty popular among fans of anime. Unless support is built-in, you generally need the CCCP codec pack which doesn't play well with other codec packs (e.g. k-lite) and you need to uninstall them. I don't fool around with Matroska, so I can't direct you to a conversion tool. And, I'm not sure if the CCCP pack alone will be sufficient or whether it will work with or cause problems with Premiere Elements. You might be able to get by with a matroska media splitter like the Haali splitter and your existing codec pack. But, I don't know. Take a look at the Matroska site, especially the downloads page, and see if there is something there that you can use. You can also try Google.

Maybe someone (RJ Johnston perhaps???) has worked with it and can offer some tips/insights.

Good luck with it!

[Ron]

I have the KLite codec pack installed but have a missing codec.

What I am trying to do is convert a video file from a .mkv to something that I can more easily use. Any recommendations welcome.

I believe the latest version of Super will convert it.

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

Thanks for that Ron. Looking into it as soon as I finish here.

[RJ Johnston]

AVIDemux can read MKV files and also create them. It's free. What I did was take a DV-AVI file and convert it to Xvid4 video and MP3 audio streams in a MKV container. AVIDemux was able to read it back.

http://www.avidemux.org

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

Thanks RJ. Will explore that.

[RJ Johnston]

I was just trying to convert the MKV back to DV-AVI, but AVIDemux only supports export to DV in PAL 720x576 format.

VirtualDubMod has support for MKV. What's inside the MKV will determine if VDM crashes or not. I was able to read the MKV in VDMod using the AVISynth template DirectShowSource. Some other MKV's I created wouldn't open in VDM no matter if I used a template or not. I got an error message that there wasn't a video stream.

[RJ Johnston]

I discovered that when trying to open MKV files with VirtualDubMod using the avisynth template, that If I get a "video stream not found" error, that if I open it a second time, it loads without that error.

I also created my own DirectShowSource template stating what the frame rate should be, as AVISynth didn't know what the frame rate should be.

In Notepad I have these two lines:

#ASYNTHER DirectShowSource fps=29.97
[DirectShowSource("%f", fps=29.97)]

Then I saved that to the Template folder within the VirtualDubMod folder, where all the other .avst templates are located.

VirtualDubMod was using my CoreAVC codec to decode the MKV file, but I put that codec at a lower priority, and then DivX became the next codec used. I was using GraphEdt to tell me what codecs were used.