- Introduction
- Installation
- Reporting bugs & getting support
- Test suite and continuous integration tests
- Code of Conduct
- Included third-party components and their licenses
With these tools one can get information about (via mkvinfo) Matroska files, extract tracks/data from (via mkvextract) Matroska files and create (via mkvmerge) Matroska files from other media files. Matroska is a new multimedia file format aiming to become THE new container format for the future. You can find more information about it and its underlying technology, the Extensible Binary Meta Language (EBML), at
The full documentation for each command is now maintained in its
man page only. Type mkvmerge -h
to get you started.
This code comes under the GPL v2 (see www.gnu.org or the file COPYING). Modify as needed.
The icons are based on the work of Alexandr Grigorcea and modified by Eduard Geier. They're licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
The newest version can always be found at https://mkvtoolnix.download/
Moritz Bunkus [email protected]
If you want to compile the tools yourself, you must first decide if you want to use a 'proper' release version or the current development version. As both Matroska and MKVToolNix are under heavy development, there might be features available in the git repository that are not available in the releases. On the other hand the git repository version might not even compile.
In order to compile MKVToolNix, you need a couple of libraries. Most of them should be available pre-compiled for your distribution. The programs and libraries you absolutely need are:
-
A C++ compiler that supports several features of the C++11, C++14, C++17 & C++20 standards: initializer lists, range-based
for
loops, right angle brackets, theauto
keyword, lambda functions, thenullptr
keyword, tuples, alias declarations,std::make_unique()
, digit separators, binary literals, generic lambdas, user-defined literals forstd::string
,[[maybe_unused]]
attribute, nested namespace definition, structured bindings,std::optional
, designated initializers, concepts, three-way comparison operators. Others may be needed, too. For GCC this means at least v10; for clang v10 or later. -
libOgg and libVorbis for access to Ogg/OGM files and Vorbis support
-
zlib β a compression library
-
Boost β Several of Boost's libraries are used, e.g.
filesystem
,multi-precision
,operators
,system
. At least v1.66.0 is required. -
libxslt's xsltproc binary and DocBook XSL stylesheets β for creating man pages from XML documents
You also need the rake
or drake
build program. I suggest rake
v10.0.0 or newer (this is included with Ruby 2.1) as it offers
parallel builds out of the box. If you only have an earlier version of
rake
, you can install and use the drake
gem for the same gain.
Several required libraries might not be available for your
distribution. Therefore they're bundled with the MKVToolNix source
code. The configure
script will look for those libraries and use
existing versions if present. If not, the bundled versions are used
instead.
It is highly recommended to install the versions provided by your distribution instead of relying on the bundled versions.
These libraries are:
-
fmt β a small, safe and fast formatting library. Version 8.0.0 or later is required.
-
libEBML v1.4.4 or later and libMatroska v1.7.1 or later for low-level access to Matroska files. Instructions on how to compile them are a bit further down in this file.
-
librmff β a library for accessing RealMedia files
-
nlohmann's JSON β JSON for Modern C++
-
Qt v6.2.0 or newer β a cross-platform library including a UI toolkit. The library is needed for all programs, even if you decide not to build MKVToolNix GUI.
-
pugixml β light-weight, simple and fast XML parser for C++ with XPath support
-
utf8-cpp β UTF-8 with C++ in a Portable Way
Other libraries are optional and only limit the features that are built. These include:
-
cmark β the CommonMark parsing and rendering library in C is required when building MKVToolNix GUI.
-
libFLAC for FLAC support (Free Lossless Audio Codec)
-
po4a for building the translated man pages
This is optional as MKVToolNix comes with its own set of the libraries. It will use them if no version is found on the system.
Start by either downloading the latest releases of libEBML and libMatroska or by getting fresh copies from their git repositories:
git clone https://github.com/Matroska-Org/libebml.git
git clone https://github.com/Matroska-Org/libmatroska.git
First build and install libEBML according to the included instructions. Afterwards do the same for libMatroska.
Either download the current release from the MKVToolNix home page and unpack it or get a development snapshot from my Git repository.
You can ignore this subsection if you want to build from a release tarball.
All you need for Git repository access is to download a Git client from the Git homepage at http://git-scm.com/. There are clients for both Unix/Linux and Windows.
First clone my Git repository with this command:
git clone https://gitlab.com/mbunkus/mkvtoolnix.git
Now change to the MKVToolNix directory with cd mkvtoolnix
and run
./autogen.sh
which will generate the "configure" script. You need
the GNU "autoconf" utility for this step.
If you have run make install
for both libraries, then configure
should automatically find the libraries' position. Otherwise you need
to tell configure
where the libEBML and libMatroska include and
library files are:
./configure \
--with-extra-includes=/where/i/put/libebml\;/where/i/put/libmatroska \
--with-extra-libs=/where/i/put/libebml/make/linux\;/where/i/put/libmatroska/make/linux
Now run rake
and, as "root", rake install
.
By default the commands executed by the build system aren't
output. You can change that by adding V=1
as an argument to the
rake
command.
If rake
executes too many processes at once, then you've stumbled
across a known bug in rake
. In that case you should install the
drake
Ruby gem and use the command drake
instead of
rake
. drake
supports parallelism properly and doesn't try to
execute all jobs at once.
You can compile MKVToolNix with Sun's sunstudio compiler, but you need
additional options for configure
:
./configure --prefix=/usr \
CXX="/opt/sunstudio12.1/bin/CC -library=stlport4" \
CXXFLAGS="-D_POSIX_PTHREAD_SEMANTICS" \
--with-extra-includes=/where/i/put/libebml\;/where/i/put/libmatroska \
--with-extra-libs=/where/i/put/libebml/make/linux\;/where/i/put/libmatroska/make/linux
Building and running unit tests is completely optional. If you want to do this, you have to follow these steps:
-
Download the "googletest" framework from https://github.com/google/googletest/ (at the time of writing the file to download was "googletest-release-1.8.0.tar.gz")
-
Extract the archive somewhere and create a symbolic link to its
googletest-release-1.8.0/googletest
sub-directory inside MKVToolNix'lib
directory and call itgtest
, e.g. like this:ln -s /path/to/googletest-release-1.8.0/googletest lib/gtest
-
Configure MKVToolNix normally.
-
Build the unit test executable and run it with
rake tests:run_unit
If you're sure you've found a bug β e.g. if one of my programs crashes with an obscur error message, or if the resulting file is missing part of the original data, then by all means submit a bug report.
I use GitLab's issue system as my bug database. You can submit your bug reports there. Please be as verbose as possible β e.g. include the command line, if you use Windows or Linux etc.pp.
If at all possible, please include sample files as well so that I can reproduce the issue. If they are larger than 1 MB, please upload them somewhere and post a link in the issue. You can also upload them to my FTP server. Details on how to connect can be found in the MKVToolNix FAQ.
The issue tracker above is not meant for general support which you can find in the following places:
- The MKVToolNix help forum is suitable for all kinds of questions.
- The MKVToolNix thread on Doom9's forum is more suited for in-depth technical questions.
- There's also the IRC channel
#matroska
on the Libera IRC network where we hang out. The main MKVToolNix author Moritz Bunkus is known as "mosu" there.
MKVToolNix contains a lot of test cases in order to detect regressions before they're released. Regressions include both compilation issues as well as changes from expected program behavior.
As mentioned in section 2.6., MKVToolNix comes with a set of unit
tests based on the Google Test library in the tests/unit
sub-directory that you can run yourself. These cover only a small
amount of code, and any effort to extend them would be most welcome.
A second test suite exists that targets the program behavior, e.g. the
output generated by mkvmerge when specific options are used with
specific input files. These are the test cases in the tests
directory itself. Unfortunately the files they run on often contain
copyrighted material that I cannot distribute. Therefore you cannot
run them yourself.
A third pillar of the testing effort is the continuous integration tests run on a Buildbot instance. These are run automatically for each commit made to the git repository. The tests include:
- building of all the packages for Linux distributions that I normally provide for download myself in both 32-bit and 64-bit variants
- building of the Windows installer and portable packages in both 32-bit and 64-bit variants
- building with both g++ and clang++
- building and running the unit tests
- building and running the test file test suite
- building with all optional features disabled
Please note that this project is released with a Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.
MKVToolNix includes and uses the following libraries & artwork:
Reading and writing AVI files. Originally part of the transcode
package.
- Copyright: 1999 Rainer Johanni [email protected]
- License: GNU General Public License v2 or later
- URL: the
transcode
project doesn't seem to have a home page anymore - Corresponding files:
lib/avilib-0.6.10/*
A C++ library to parse EBML files
- Copyright: 2002-2021 Steve Lhomme et. al.
- License: GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 or later (see
doc/licenses/LGPL-2.1.txt
) - URL: http://www.matroska.org/
- Corresponding files:
lib/libebml/*
A C++ library to parse Matroska files
- Copyright: 2002-2020 Steve Lhomme et. al.
- License: GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 or later (see
doc/licenses/LGPL-2.1.txt
) - URL: http://www.matroska.org/
- Corresponding files:
lib/libmatroska/*
librmff is short for 'RealMedia file format access library'. It aims at providing the programmer an easy way to read and write RealMedia files.
- Copyright: Moritz Bunkus
- License: GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 or later (see
doc/licenses/LGPL-2.1.txt
) - URL: https://www.bunkus.org/videotools/librmff/index.html
- Corresponding files:
lib/librmff/*
JSON for Modern C++
- Copyright: 2013-2021 Niels Lohmann
- License: MIT (see
doc/licenses/nlohmann-json-MIT.txt
) - URL: https://github.com/nlohmann/json
- Corresponding files:
lib/nlohmann-json/*
An XML processing library
- Copyright: 2006β2020 by Arseny Kapoulkine [email protected]
- License: MIT (see
doc/licenses/pugixml-MIT.txt
) - URL: https://pugixml.org/
- Corresponding files:
lib/pugixml/*
UTF-8 with C++ in a Portable Way
- Copyright: 2006-2021 Nemanja Trifunovic
- License: Boost Software License 1.0 (see
doc/licenses/Boost-1.0.txt
) - URL: https://github.com/nemtrif/utfcpp/
- Corresponding files:
lib/utf8-cpp/*
A lot of the icons included in this package originate from the Oxygen
Project. These include all files in the share/icons/oxygen
sub-directory.
All of the sound files in the share/sounds
sub-directory originate
from the Oxygen project.
- License: GNU Lesser General Public License v3 (see
doc/licenses/LGPL-3.0.txt
) - URL: https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Oxygen
- Corresponding files:
share/icons/oxygen/*
share/sounds/*
- Copyright:
- 2011 Alexandr Grigorcea [email protected]
- 2012 Eduard Geier [email protected]
- 2012 Ben Humpert [email protected]
- License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) (see
doc/licenses/CC-BY-3.0.txt
) - Corresponding files:
share/icons/*/mkv*
A highly configurable, custom Qt widget for showing "waiting" or "loading" spinner icons in Qt applications
- Copyright:
- 2012β2014 by Alexander Turkin
- 2014 by William Hallatt
- 2015 by Jacob Dawid
- License: MIT (see
doc/licenses/QtWaitingSpinner-MIT.txt
) - URL: https://github.com/snowwlex/QtWaitingSpinner
- Corresponding files:
src/mkvtoolnix-gui/util/waiting_spinning_widget.{h,cpp}
A beefed-up tab widget class for Qt extracted from the Qt Creator project
- Copyright: 2011 Nokia Corporation and/or its subsidiary(-ies).
- License: GNU General Public License v2 (see
COPYING
) - Corresponding files:
src/mkvtoolnix-gui/util/fancy_tab_widget.{h,cpp}
Small, safe and fast formatting library
- Copyright: 2012βpresent by Victor Zverovich
- License: BSD (see
doc/licenses/fmt-BSD.txt
) - URL: https://fmt.dev/latest/
- Corresponding files:
lib/fmt/*
A groupbox that collapses/expands when toggled. Extracted from the QGIS project.
- Copyright: 2012βpresent by Etienne Tourigny
- License: GNU General Public License v2 or later (see
COPYING
) - URL: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS
- Corresponding files:
src/mkvtoolnix-gui/util/qgs_collapsible_group_box.{h,cpp}
The theme (palette) used on Windows
- Copyright: 2016 The Qt Company Ltd.
- License: GNU General Public License v2 (see
COPYING
) - Corresponding files:
src/mkvtoolnix-gui/app/windows.cpp