Editing MKV with multiple Audio Tracks and Subtitles

[Jaks]

Hello there Videohelp.com community,

I am currently lost on a problem with cutting/editing MKV files. First of all heres what i want to do:

Ive got several MKV Files with multiple audio tracks and multiple subtitle streams. I want to cut off the first 1-2 Minutes and a small segment somewhere in the middle, PREFERABLY without re-encoding.

Heres what MediaInfo says about the files:

1 video Stream: AVC [850kbps, 720*480 @ 25fps, AVC (NTSC) (High@L5.1) (CABAC / 11 Ref Frames)
3 audio Streams: MPEG Audio (MP3) [Three times]
2 text streams: UTF-8 / UTF-8

Ive tried pretty much every tool and video editor out there and i just cannot get it to work ALTHOUGH if i could combine functionalities of some of the tools i used it might work out.

Heres the tools i used and the problems i had with them:

1. Virtualdub (Latest nightly 64bit with Matroska64 Plugin): Virtualdub is pretty much the closest i can get. It lets me open the file, it lets me seek through it, it lets me edit it, and it lets me save it with direct stream copy. The thing is that virtualdub makes me lose my subtitles and i can only choose 1 single audio track as a source.

2. Virtualdubmod (Latest version, matroska plugin doesnt seem to work): Virtualdubmod handles all audio- and subtitle streams pretty well. It shows them in the "streams" menu, and i can select or de-select them. The problem is that it doesnt show any video at all, and it doesnt let me export the file even when trying to cut blindly by copying the frame numbers over from "vanilla" virtualdub. I guess this is due to ancient MKV support as it already shows me lots of warnings when opening the file.

3. Avidemux (Latest nightly): Avidemux does not let me seek within the video making it absolutely impossible to cut it, as the only way to advance in time is by going forward frame by frame. It does at least let me export the video with multiple audio tracks. Subtitles seem to be lost though.

I tried some other tools/editors which worked even worse. Re-encoding the MKV file to some other format before editing in virtualdub doesnt appear to be an option either, as none of them seem to support subtitles.

What id need is a virtualdubmod version that handles MKV files as propperly as the latest virtualdub version does, but i dont seem to be able to find anything like that on the web.

So my question is: Is this just impossible to do? Am i having a codec problem? Or am i just dumb? Or is there maybe another workaround/software to do this?

Thanks for any help and greetings from Germany

[Baldrick]

I think mkvtoolnix / mkvmergegui can cut and keep subtitles. But you must cut/splice manually by entering timecodes....

[Jaks]

Thanks for the quick answer Baldrick. It really does work using mkvmerge gui. It definately takes some time to get the perfect timecodes using virtualdub, enter them in mkvmerge gui and merge the resulting parts together again, but hey, it works exactly the way i wanted it to work.

There seems to be some weird offset when using the vdub timecodes, but it is exactly 3 seconds and it is persistent, so thats no big deal.

Thanks a lot