Another MKV DVD question *sigh*

[sandman28]

Howdy,

Now I am fairly n00b when it comes to video and audio files, but have been trying to research over the past few days and if there is another post that answers this question then I couldnt find it (so dont flame me for not looking!! :P ).

What the deal is:

I have many .mkv files that i wish to put onto DVDs to play in my home DVD/PS2 player, all of these .mkv files have their audio included in the .mkv file (or so i assume asume as there is no other files apart from videos ones there, remeber I am a n00b!! so i know nothing lol) and some have 2 audio tracks (eg one in english another in Japanese), also most have subtitles, with a set of 14 having 2 subtitle trackes (with one that strangely comes up with nothing! :S ). However as said before there are no other files in the directory apart from the video files themselfs (ie no subtitle files either).

Now after dowloading (trial versions) many DVD programs and converting programs and reading heaps of posts on forums, I have yet to fully understand how I could convert these files to DVD format (as in have a dvd with 5 episodes) so that they would keep their subtitles (more important) and both audio tracks (less important, but I wouldn't know how to get the file across to dvd with just the japanese track anyway) and if remotely possible a functioning DVD menu.

Now thats a massive post there so Im sorry for that, however if someone could either tell me:
-a program that can do that automatically
-a link to a guide that a noobie could understand
-or just some friendly advice

I would be more than grateful
Cheers
Sandman

P.S again im very sorry if this has already been covered elsewhere but i couldnt find it
P.S.S some programs i tried but didnt have success with were :
-avi2dvd
-TMPGEnc (although thats possibly cos i didnt play with it enuf)
-Many DVD converter software programs (dvdlab pro and such)

[paulw]

I downloaded the Matroska Pack Full v1.1.2 from I think http://www.cccp-project.net/ and installed it. Any MKC files I download I change the file extension to avi then import to Procoder and convert to DVD file.

[sandman28]

Thanks for the quick reply, will test it out now

Cheers
Sandman28

[sandman28]

Howdy,

Yeh I tried changing the file extension (ie renamed it from .mkv to .avi) and then tried to import it into Procoder, this worked ok for the files with one audio and subtitle track but would not work for the ones with two (the audio tracks seemed to merge into one so u cood hear both at the same time). One way I think I may be able to do it is using the MKVmerge program to change the file so that there was only one audio and subtitle track and then use TMPGEnc to change the file into .m2v file, but thats a pain in the ass and also would prefer to have both the audio tracks there on the dvd, to make it look professional, so do u have any other ideas?

EDIT- Another problem, the ones where the subtitles are actually part of the video file are fine to convert and burn, however the ones where the subtitles are seperate tracks there seems to be little support from any of the programs used so far, except for avi2dvd however that treats each file as if it was going to be on its own dvd. I have managed to figure out a way to seperate the subtitle tracks from the .mkv file through the use of MKVmerge, however I do not know if that was the correct way to 'unpack' the stream as such. So does anyone know how to make the subtitle stream part of the actual video?


Cheers
Sandman28

[Baldrick]

No tool can do all that automatically. Maybe you can try COnvertXtoDVD but even it can't handle all mkvs fine, usually sync problems and I don't know if it can handle the muxed mkv subs. Another tool that handles mkv is FAVC if you have installed the decoders for it.

Doing it manually:
Convert the mkv to mpg/m2v. Ignore the audio.
If you want both audio tracks use mkvextractgui and extract both audio tracks and convert to ac3 if's not that already.
Extract the subtitles from the mkv using mkextractgui also. Convert the subs to srt.
Add the video and choose the both ac3 files as audio source and add the subtitle in an authoring tool like tmpgenc dvd author, dvd-lab pro.
Make menus.
Burn.

But a media center with full mkv support would be the best idea, see www.mpcclub.com ...or else will you spend more time converting the mkv to dvd then watching them .

[sandman28]

Howdy,

Thanks Baldrick , what I ended up doing was using mkvextractgui to extract all audio, subtile tracks and even the visual track (was a .avi) to save time, then had the pain in the ass job of converting each single .mp3 audio track to .ac3 (as it wouldnt be batch converted cos i couldn't find a program to do it ), and then ran a batch encode to convert the .avi files to .m2v with TMPGEnc (left running overnight) discarded the audio track that TMPGEnc created and then imported all video and audio files in DVDlab- Pro, however the program wouldnt accept straight importing of .ssa files (EDIT - apparently it wont allow batch 'asset adding'/importing of anything other than stream files eg .s1- EDIT) for subtitles (i was going to convert them to .srt files but when reading up about it they were apparently less quality than .ssa? is that correct?), so I had to use DVDLab- Pro's subtitle editor for each subtitle track to open each .ssa then convert them to a stream (.s1 and .s2), once that was finally done I created the first volume and everything is happy, ie both audio tracks present as well as subtitle tracks, however the subtitles have this annoying thing where at the begining of each new 'block'/'set'/'frame' of subtitles there is a comma placed at the begeining as though it was a cue or somethign for the program, any idea how to fix this?

Anyway thanks heaps for ur help because I now know how to do it for any other .mkv files I have , it is a pain in the butt though, one would have thought some wise person would have created a program to make it much simpler for n00bs like me :P

Once again
Cheers
Sandman28