"dnelms" wrote:
I've tried to find something that would repackage my MKV files (have over 200 of them) with having to re-encode. So IF you or anyone knows of such, please give me a heads up and I'll try it out. I have found, since not being able to find such software, that I am having to take the MKV file and use it as a source in Handbrake and re-encoding it as a .m4v.
As I've said, I don't have a lot of experience with MKVs, but I have done some experimentation. First, you have to make sure the underlying streams in the MKV are Roku compatible (namely MPEG4/H.264 at 29.97 or 23.976fps and AAC or AC-3 audio). I use
MediaInfo to give me info on video files. To extract the streams, or demux, I've used
MKVToolnix. There's a Windows GUI for it called
MKVextractGUI2. To remux the extracted streams, I use
MP4Box. There's all kinds of Windows GUIs for it, but the one I've used is
YAMB.
There's probably other ways to do it as well and as you can see there's a few steps involved. I haven't found a one-click solution, but I can't really say I've tried. I've had success using this method in my experiments, but I believe I've also had some failures. I just repackaged a 2GB MKV file into a MP4 in about 5 minutes on my quad-core machine. I was surprised it worked since the video frame rate was 60fps.
A couple of notes:
In my limited experience with MKVs they tend to have AC-3 audio or MP3 audio. MP3 audio isn't supported in a video file and to play AC-3 audio your box has to be set to 5.1 surround mode and you have to have an AC-3 capable TV/receiver. If your MKVs don't have compatible audio streams, you could extract the streams, convert the audio to a compatible format and then remux, but it's probably easier to just go ahead and use HandBrake.
-JT
Roku Community Streaming Expert
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