
Ripping a Blu Ray or DVD directly with MKVMerge is asking for trouble, so as far as I'm concerned the best method is to rip with MakeMKV, then remux with MKVMerge. Basically, MakeMKV makes for neater tracks, nicely synced and neatly organised, yet MKVMerge is the superior Matroska muxer, assuming the tracks it's muxing have been pre-processed in some way. However, if you remux an MKV made by MakeMKV using MKVMerge, the resulting file will come out smaller. It's incapable of re-encoding anything into anything, it just dumbly muxes tracks from one container to another wihtout alteration. MKVMerge makes no attempt to sync audio, if the audio is a little shorter or longer than the video it will leave a gap in whichever is the shorter. You can install it with a GUI but I didn’t bother.MakeMKV decrypts optical discs, re-encodes audio, makes sure video tracks are in sync with the audio and are fully constant frame rate with no gaps. Mkvtoolnix is a set of command line programs for finding out information and modifying mkv (“Matroska”) files.

I streamed a few DJ sets over the last few weeks with a bunch of friends as part of ‘covidcore’, an online get-together while we’re all in isolation.


Extract audio or video from MKV files with mkvtoolnix
