Removing a audio channel

[access820]

I have some video files with French and English audio an I ma trying to remove the french they are in Mkv format. I thaught that I used mkvtools be fore but the new version doesn't seem to work.

[jagabo]

https://www.videohelp.com/software/MKVToolNix

[netmask56]

Works for me - I do this all the time, just untick the audio track you don't want and remux. Works exactly like earlier versions

[jagabo]

It won't work if the audio has two languages in one stereo track, one language on the left channel, the other on the right. Or one language in-phase in both channels, the other out of phase in both.

[netmask56]

Whoa! Never heard of or encountered a track like that! The EBU had a few odd standards for 16 and 17.5mm magnetic film that put a L+R signal on the centre track and a L-R on the edge track. They were then matixed on playback to derive separate left and right signals. The thinking was the if the edge track became damaged a viable mono signal would be left ok on the centre.

In the OP case, if it's a track like you describe he would have to extract the one audio track then and then separate the left and right using Audition or similar and then remux back in to the mkv, but he said it worked before so my guess it's just operational error.

[sneaker]

If MKVToolNix GUI doesn't start read: https://gitlab.com/mbunkus/mkvtoolnix/wikis/DLLs-not-found
If you have Windows XP you can use an older version: https://mkvtoolnix.download/windows/releases/10.0.0/ (Though I do recommend getting a newer OS. There are a lot of bugfixes in mkvtoolnix you will miss out on. Maybe it's possible to put newest mkvmerge.exe to old mkvtoolnix-gui.exe for a while.)

[jagabo]

Whoa! Never heard of or encountered a track like that! The EBU had a few odd standards for 16 and 17.5mm magnetic film that put a L+R signal on the centre track and a L-R on the edge track. They were then matixed on playback to derive separate left and right signals. The thinking was the if the edge track became damaged a viable mono signal would be left ok on the centre.

That's basically the same idea. With the in/out of phase technique one channel contains languages A+B, the other A-B. To hear only one language you add the two channels together, (A+B) + (A-B) = 2A. To hear only the other language you subtract them (A+B) - (A-B) = 2B. I've only seen this used on rips from Russian VCDs.