Adding chapters with MKVToolNix

[cornholio1980]

Hi guys!

First of all, I'm new to all this, and also to this forum. Plus, I'm not a native speaker. So sorry if it takes me a little longer to comprehend some things - or if my question should turn out to be completely stupid .

I'm trying to (manually) add chapters to a mkv-file. Since I had no clue how this might work, I watched this "how to"-video on YouTube -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tly-K6s_EM. As far as I can tell, I did everthing exactly like the guy in the video. I tried creating two chapters (just to try it out), added them to the mkv-file, but neither of my players on the PC (VLC, WMP, PowerDVD) nor my Blu-Ray-Player is recognizing them. Here's the text from the xml-file, hoping that the experts in here will be able to tell me right away what I did wrong.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- <!DOCTYPE Chapters SYSTEM "matroskachapters.dtd"> -->
<Chapters>
<EditionEntry>
<EditionUID>7944375882544742540</EditionUID>
<ChapterAtom>
<ChapterTimeStart>00:00:00.000000000</ChapterTimeStart>
<ChapterTimeEnd>00:04:28.000000000</ChapterTimeEnd>
<ChapterSegmentUID format="hex">72f081be2d622240c9194730b25854bd</ChapterSegmentUID>
<ChapterUID>13397306215281557780</ChapterUID>
<ChapterDisplay>
<ChapterString>Kapitel 01</ChapterString>
<ChapterLanguage>und</ChapterLanguage>
<ChapLanguageIETF>und</ChapLanguageIETF>
</ChapterDisplay>
</ChapterAtom>
<ChapterAtom>
<ChapterTimeStart>00:04:28.000000000</ChapterTimeStart>
<ChapterTimeEnd>00:40:00.000000000</ChapterTimeEnd>
<ChapterSegmentUID format="hex">72f081be2d622240c9194730b25854bd</ChapterSegmentUID>
<ChapterUID>13776312054416289850</ChapterUID>
<ChapterDisplay>
<ChapterString>Kapitel 02</ChapterString>
<ChapterLanguage>und</ChapterLanguage>
<ChapLanguageIETF>und</ChapLanguageIETF>
</ChapterDisplay>
</ChapterAtom>
</EditionEntry>
</Chapters>

Many thanks in advance, and sorry for bugging you with this.
cornholio1980

[pcspeak]

Straight from the horse's mouth.
Try using this page as a reference. Example 1 - about halfway down the page.
https://www.matroska.org/technical/chapters.html
Cheers

[ProWo]

You could also try this:
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/407857-Joint-MiniDV-file-create-chapters-QTGMC-H265#post2674819

[pcspeak]

@ProWo
That's interesting!
I'll bookmark the page for my next attempt at chapters.
Cheers.

[jagabo]

I imported your XML chapter list into a random MKV video and it worked fine in MPCHC, MPCBE, Potplayer, and KMPlayer. Your problem is that the players you listed don't support XML chapters.

For VLC (and the above players and others) use simple chapters instead. See the section on simple chapters:

https://mkvtoolnix.download/doc/mkvmerge.html#mkvmerge.chapters

mkvmerge input.mkv --chapters output.txt -o chapters.mkv

[Ennio]

I imported your XML chapter list into a random MKV video and it worked fine in MPCHC, MPCBE, Potplayer, and KMPlayer. Your problem is that the players you listed don't support XML chapters.

For VLC (and the above players and others) use simple chapters instead. See the section on simple chapters:

Indeed OP's chapterlist does not work with VLC.

With MKVToolNix I created a chapters.xml file, exactly the same way as in the video. Saved it to a mkv and chapters do show up in VLC.
Comparing the two outputs, there are two similar lines in OP's file that are missing in mine:

<ChapterSegmentUID format="hex">some hex string</ChapterSegmentUID>

Given OP also did exactly the same as in the video, why would these two lines be in his xml output and not in mine?

[cornholio1980]

Thank you so much for all your replies! And I'm sorry for not coming back sooner, but the last couple of days have been a little crazy. Thus, I only found the time today to go and try it again.

Special thanks for jagabo's advice to use simple chapters, that seems to have done the trick - at least for VLC media player. Unfortunately, my Blu-Ray-Player (LG BP350) still doesn't recognize them. But I guess that's a problem with the player itself, not the mkv-file. However, since there obviously are a couple of different ways on how to include chapters, if someone has any experience with that problem in particular, and could tell me which approach is the most promising so that the chapters will work there too, I'd really appreciate it. Nevertheless, thanks again for your replies and your help!

[jagabo]

By the way, I was able to confirm Ennio's observation in post #6. The XML chapter list in the first post is has the extra lines and some elements are in different places. When I created chapters in MKVToolNix GUI myself as per the video linked in the first post, VLC would show and use them. Maybe it's an MKVToolNix version difference? I used v25.0.0 (about a year old).

[Ennio]

For what it's worth, I used latest version 72.0.0

[jagabo]

Since the version numbers are so different I checked again. The version I have is 64.0.

[hubblec4]

for chapter editing, creating, manipulating use chapterEditor