Matroska is an extremely powerful and features rich multimedia container format. It’s completely free and supports a huge number of codecs (audio/video) and many other advanced features that aren’t even supported by some of the premium, proprietary container formats.
It’s also known for its robustness, because unlike many other formats (the old and troublesome “avi” for instance) it has a very low content corruption rate. From storing into a lot of codecs (MPEG, Windows audio/video, H263, H264, Xvid, Divx, MP3, OGG Vorbis, Flac, AAC etc) to multiple stream support, adding subtitles plus it even supports “menus”, like with the Vob (DVD video content holder).
For dealing with MKV files such as putting an audio/video stream into or extracting a content from a MKV the developers do give us a cross-platform tool (GUI) called MKVtoolnix.
But if you’re looking for something a bit more lightweight and simple than the MKVtoolnix GUI, then you should try this other one called “MKV-Extractor-GUI”.
Main features …
*. The UI is written in Bash and uses Python as the engine, and it’s basically a front-end for the mkv-tool-nix command-line tools.
*. Lets you edit the content of a MKV file by deleting or editing the files inside the container (adding a video, audio stream, add subtitles, deleting attachments etc). However you cannot add new files into it (can only edit the existing content).
*. Analyze and shows the current content and other info (codec type, FPS etc).
*. Previewing the “attachments” (such as pictures, if there are any).
*. Repair window. This is useful for integrity checking and if it finds errors then it’ll fix them (not every error is fixable though).
*. A debug window.
*. Built in DTS to AC3 audio converter (with volume gain).
You can install “MKV-Extractor-GUI” in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04 by using its PPA. For that please use the below commands in your Terminal window.
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:hizo/logiciels
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mkv-extractor-gui
That should do it.
I'm glad you like my software.
Not wanting to duplicate with "mkvmerge gui", I do not propose the addition of track.
For information, the Czech language is now avaialble
Yea, it's pretty cool & useful :). Thanks for the comment Hizoka.
doesn’t work…
[email protected]:~$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:hizo/logiciels
Cannot add PPA: ‘ppa:~hizo/ubuntu/logiciels’.
The user named ‘~hizo’ has no PPA named ‘ubuntu/logiciels’
Please choose from the following available PPAs:
* ‘bash’: bash commands
* ‘kiesse’: Kiesse
* ‘mkv-extractor-gui’: MKV Extractor Gui
* ‘screencastor’: Screencastor
* ‘tests’: tests
* ‘zenitor’: Zenitor
@Don but honestly – doesn’t the error message tell you exactly what to do?
Obviously at some stage hizo has stopped using a single ppa named logiciels and split it into a bunch of other ppas each named after the single piece of software in it.
If you want mkv-extractor-gui, you’ll need to use sudo apt-add-repository ppa:hizo/mkv-extractor-gui won’t you?