AlltoAVI gives sound, no video

[EwanG]

Today's lesson - volunteering to help can cause you to pull out your hair...

Friend of mine wants to make a DVD of some home videos. Asked teenage son who I'm guessing is into Anime to get the files off their home camcorder. Said son decided to be "fun", and created an MKV file with an English and a Spanish audio track. Didn't bother to hold onto the DV file, so this is all I have to work with.

From reading through the forum, I gathered that the quickest way to get an MKV into a format I could work with was to use the AlltoAVI tool. However, having tried a number of different options, I keep getting the same result. Namely that while it claims to be creating an AVI with Video and Audio, both VLC and WMP insist that it's an audio-only file.

Pointers on what I'm doing wrong? Suggestions for other tools that could get me an AVI or MPEG2 file from this?

TIA,
Ewan Grantham

[Baldrick]

mencoder, super , mediacoder
or if you can play the mkv with wmp use avisynth and frameserve it to a an encoder.

[EwanG]

Could you suggest a command line/options for mencoder? I DL'd Super, and that seems to work with mencoder selected as the processing option, but I'd prefer to do it at the command line so I can do the other couple videos I have on my Linux machine.

Thanks again,
Ewan

[Baldrick]

some examples,
https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=268844#2

[EwanG]

Well, I spoke too soon. I finally took a moment to watch a full file, and discovered that every couple of minutes the sound would drop out for about 30 seconds as if it was running at a different rate than the video and the sound was getting reset to stay in sync. I'll try the command line for mencoder to see if that works any better, and will ask my friend if his son can tell me what settings he used to create the original file.

Sheesh...