MKVToolnix damages video quality, any recommendations?

[Mara-K1]

People have been saying mkvtoolnix is good to remove subtitles n vids without reencoding but removing audio files, there's compression artefacts or just plain damage in the picture. Would be nice if there's a better recommendation.

Here's one vid showing what happens if you remove unwanted audio with MKVToolnix's gui: www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-rjbQfhvPU

[jagabo]

MkvToolnix can't reencode anything so something about the way the video was remuxed is causing VLC to have problems playing it. Is it only at the start of the clip or does the rest of the video continue to have problems? Do other players show the same errors?

You can try using ffmpeg to remux.

[ProWo]

Mkvtoolnix only remux the single streams.
Anyway, you could try clever Ffmpeg-GUI, multiplex section.

[flashandpan007]

Try another player like MPC-BE, same issue with newly muxed file?

[Mara-K1]

Jagabo seems to have a point. I just played the remuxed vid in an editor and MPC-BE. Looks fine.

Kind of strange that the culprit, MKVToolnix, causes VLC to mess up. Such a burden when something like this happens, especially when I have over 100 vids to work on and I don't have the time to watch every single one to see if there's compression artefacts in every single second of more than a thousand hours of content.

[jagabo]

Kind of strange that the culprit, MKVToolnix, causes VLC to mess up.

It may be that VLC is "culprit." What MKVToolnix is doing may be just fine and it's a bug in VLC that's causing the problem.

[TE16]

Try Potplayer instead of VLC. Always found it to be more stable with different playing back different codecs.

[El Heggunte]

Jagabo seems to have a point. I just played the remuxed vid in an editor and MPC-BE. Looks fine.

Kind of strange that the culprit, MKVToolnix, causes VLC to mess up. Such a burden when something like this happens, especially when I have over 100 vids to work on and I don't have the time to watch every single one to see if there's compression artefacts in every single second of more than a thousand hours of content.

Please read this page:

"Improving playback compatibility with players.
Options for improving playback on players that don't implement the full Matroska specification."

https://gitlab.com/mbunkus/mkvtoolnix/-/wikis/Improving-playback-compatibility-with-players

[mrbass]

Sounds like


Not using certain new language elements with --disable-language-ietf

Would be the first thing I’d try to see if it resolves the issue after reading all those possibilities.