[SOLVED] Tearing my hair out over this... muxing unmuxing..

[Leijonasisu]

I have a bunch of Anime that I want to edit.

Basically it goes like this. I want to play the Anime on my 42" television. If I load the .mkv files up to the television they play fine. No problems with upscaling or anything. However, the episodes have 2 audio tracks. English and Japanese (for convenience, though not to mine).

I just want Japanese. Also my television can't play subtitles unless they are embedded in the .mkv a certain way. Apparently my television has 'Divx codecs' so it can play .mkv with no problem but the audio track I want is in 'ogg' format. Which the tv can't decode. So the English is on AAC (which the television has NO problem with) but the Japanese is in OGG and the subtitles don't show up at all.

Normally I would be ok with English and no subs but the dubbing is terrible.

So I downloaded at least 15 different programs (eventually) to try and demux the English out of the .mkv file as well as the subtitles so I can somehow remux with just Japanese voice and Hard English subs.

I got as far as being able to strip English out of the .mkv file and extract the subtitles with 'Mkvmerge' and then remux with just the Japanese audio. But I am unable to add Hard Subs to the file... I have no idea how to.

On top of that, I have tried using Virtual Dub.. but it only opens .avi files. I then tried using a converter to convert the .mkv with just Japanese audio (subtitles are in a separate file) to an .avi and then open it with Virtual dub. It worked, so I tried to Hard sub with the 'subtitles addon' using the subs in their own .ssa file.

The result was a FOURTEEN (14) GIGABYTE file.. (the original .mkv and .avi are 250MB and 180MB respectfully).

How can I fit even a single episode onto an 8GB USB let alone be able to play such a high bitrate on a USB on my television?

I am about to tear my hair out.

Normally MKVcleaver would do a great job at this but when I pull the video stream out of the .mkv (instead of converting the .mkv to .avi) it ALWAYS seems to chop FIVE (5) whole minutes off the video! But SOMEHOW the video manages to have the entire episode despite it's loss of 5 minutes... My head literally almost fell off.

This has been the most frustrating thing I've been trying to do all week..

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If all of that above ^^^^ was TL;DR then please just read this:

1. I have Anime episodes in .mkv format. The audio (OGG) and subtitles don't work with my television.
2. I want to strip the English audio out of the .mkv and just keep the Japanese.
3. Then Hard sub the file with the English subtitles I have in whatever format (that will play on my Tv) with NO loss of quality! and no 14GB filesizes!
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Please don't tell me to search I've read guides, I've done searching I've spent 2 whole days on this. Take pity on a young man and please help me out!

P.S. All the threads I found like mine were dated back in 2007 when VirtualDubMod was brand new and AVI-MUX-Gui was still being updated...

Thanks and god bless!

[Baldrick]

Howdy!

In virtualdub must you choose a compression, under video->compression and use for example the xvid codec or divx codec. Or else will it be uncompressed=HUGE.

Or try freemake video converter, open mkv, under audio choose audio track, under video choose subtitle track, convert to whatever format your device supports.

[Cornucopia]

Unless I'm not understanding you correctly, I believe you yourself don't have a clear understanding of how video files work.

For example:
The term "hard subs" means that the subs have been composited over and BURNED INTO the video stream. The video stream now just has some different pixels on it (that happen to be in the shape of text). There is no way to remove or modify this (without highly compromising the quality of the video itself). It's like saying you want to replace Gandalf in LOTR with yourself. Not going to look good at all.

So "hard subs" and "demuxing/remuxing from the video" are MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.

Also, MKV is a container, that can contain Video streams (of VARIOUS codecs) and Audio streams (of VARIOUS codecs), as well as text/sub streams and chapter marks, etc.

So your TV likes Divx - GOOD!...when you've got a divx file. Not good when you've got an AVI or MKV that does't use the Divx (or possibly Xvid) video codec. That's why there's apps like MediaInfo, to parse through the file and tell you what's TRULY inside it, so you'll know how to proceed.

Similar thing with Audio.
Audio can have multiple languages comprised of multiple VOICES within a single channel of a single track/stream, or multiple CHANNELS within a single track/stream, or multiple TRACKS/STREAMS.
If your clip is of the 1st kind, you're SOL, end of story. Find another/better clip...
If your clip is of the 2nd kind, you would need to demux & decode to WAV, then open the track in an audio editor and remix to a new file using only the channel that you desire, then re-encode and remux.
If your clip is of the 3rd kind, THAT'S the time where you can simply demux & remux the desired track.
The point here is that you've got to truly find out what you've got first before knowing how to correctly proceed. Doesn't sound like you've done that.

Also,
What Baldrick said about Vdub is absolutely correct. If you're going to do any real manipulations to the video stream (which it sounds like you might need to do), you'll HAVE to Re-encode. Since Vdub defaults to No compression, you'll have to change it by choosing a compression codec before saving or else you'll have those HUGE files.

Tell us what MediaInfo says on your source file, and you can get a MUCH better recommendation on the correct paths to choose...

Scott

[Leijonasisu]

Howdy!

In virtualdub must you choose a compression, under video->compression and use for example the xvid codec or divx codec. Or else will it be uncompressed=HUGE.

Or try freemake video converter, open mkv, under audio choose audio track, under video choose subtitle track, convert to whatever format your device supports.

Hi neighbour!

Thanks sooo much for suggesting Freemake Video Converter. It worked like a charm. Took only a few minutes on my core i7 GTX 260 to convert all the .mkv files to .avi with hardcoded subs. I was amazed at how easy to use this program is. This really is pure freeware at it's finest. No ads no bs just what you need, where you need it.

Thanks so much again. The only minor gripe I have is that the subs look pretty 'tacky' on an .avi as hard subs, they're really nice on the .mkv.

Other than that I'm sooo pleased with this software. I used a 2-pass encoding and I only see a small difference in quality on the big screen (opposed to 1-pass) but otherwise I'm really happy. Is there any way to do a 3-pass encoding? The videos are so quick to convert that I wouldn't mind doing a 3-pass if there is an option somewhere.¨

Either way 100 out of 10 for this program. No need (for me anyway) for programs like Virtual Dub, AVI-Mux-Gui (which is OOD anyway) and other stuff if this program does them all beautifully.

Either way I'm really happy and I'm going to pull all of my stuff over now so I can watch it on the tv with this.

P.S. To the other guy, thanks for the help but I know a lot about videos. I've done a 3 year multimedia course which I finished about 2 years ago or so and I've been around a pretty long time. I think I know my way around these things, I just don't have to time to invest so much time when there has to be an easier way, and this really is so much easier. I think if anything I may have a little trouble just explaining my problem in a non-TL;DR way.