Trying to edit .mkv with Avidemux..

[brawltimore]

Please excuse my extreme noobery, I have nearly no idea what I'm doing. I'm also guessing my rickety old PC probably can't do what I'm attempting to do and my laptop is basically a word processing/browser machine so.. bear with me.

I'm trying to cut down the Ravens playoff run and 3 of the games/files I have are .mkv, one is an .mp4 and it has the same issue.
I googled and found Avidemux to be easy to use, I cut down the first video with no issue it was originally near 2gb file and is choppy at parts playing it in VLC but overall runs pretty smoothly. After cutting it from 2:16:00 to about 1:08:00 down to about 800mb.

When I tried to load and edit the next .mkv in Avidemux it ran like crap, the video lagged or stopped and the audio wouldn't stop even after Avidemux crashed and had to close it from task manager. The file is 9gb and over 3 hours long. I thought perhaps I could convert it to an .avi and then edit it but nothing changed after doing so. I cannot go from I frame to frame or even to select spots in the video. The original .mkv runs relatively well (tiny bit choppy) in VLC.

I'm probably getting ahead of myself and can't even do this with my stone age computer. Which is fine, just curious. I hope if anything this gave an experienced user a good laugh at my feeble attempt.

[hello_hello]

Do you want to re-encode the video in the process or keep the original?
I've not used Avidemux but MKVMergeGUI can be used to split MKVs. It's not an ideal way to edit as there's no preview and it does no re-encoding, which means it must split on a keyframe, so it generally can't split exactly where you tell it to. It'll find the next keyframe on from where you specify and split there, or something like that. Usually it means each split will be out by a few seconds from exactly where you specified, but unless you use a program which can re-encode some of the video (it's usually referred to as smart cutting) that's a normal limitation when splitting files. I don't know which free programs can do smart cutting, if any of them can.

As long as you know where you want to split (just work out the split points using a media player) MKVMergeGUI should be easy enough to use though. If you wish to cut out sections of the MKV you'd split it appropriately, discard the parts you don't want and use the append function to join the rest as a single MKV again. It'll also open a variety of other file types such as MP4 which you can then split while remuxing them as MKV.

[brawltimore]

thank you for your help, I downloaded the mkvmerge but I have no idea how to use it.
can you clue me in on how to start?

[Hoser Rob]

Click on the link in your post and read the guides.