A question about MKV

[newfiend]

Cool, keep me posted on the progress...

[barnabas1969]

I tried VideoRedo (VRD) on a BluRay. I have AnyDVD HD, so I am able to simply read the TS (actually, m2ts) file into VRD. Unfortunately, it does not see the subtitles stream, even though I can see it with MediaInfo. VRD will write it to a WTV file, but no captions. I found a thread on the VRD website that is related to my problem, and it appears that the developer frequently replies to comments there... so I posted a reply with a description of my problem, and I uploaded a 100MB snippet of the TS file using a tool that comes with VRD to clip a portion of a file for analysis by the developer.

Hopefully he will reply soon. I have a feeling that since the TS file contains a subtitle stream that consists of images of the letters (instead of plain text) that VRD will not be able to write a text stream into the WTV file. If that's the case, I'll ask the developer if it's possible to feed a separate SRT file into VRD to produce a WTV with captions.

Hope that's not too many acronyms.

[barnabas1969]

OK, the developer answered me (what a concept!). He said that VRD can create a DVD from a Media Center recording, and include the captions on the DVD as subtitles... but not the other way around. He also said that there is no way in VRD to mux a TS/VOB file together with an SRT file to produce a WTV file with subtitles.

So, basically, VRD can do some nice things like easily creating a WTV file from an MKV/BluRay/DVD... but not with the soft subtitles that I want. If you want to archive your recordings to DVD, VRD would be a nice tool to use... especially if you want to preserve the captions.

I'll do a little more searching now that I'm armed with enough information to be dangerous. Now that I'm motivated and understand codecs/containers/streams/subtitles/captions a little better, I'm hopeful that there are some tools to make it all happen. Even if I have to run through several steps, I'm sure I can automate it in the end.

[staknhalo]

While I understand you wanting .wtv format (I've thought long and hard about it too); keep the original sources if you're going to go that route. WTV is proprietary, and who knows what media center software you'll be using down the line and if it will be compatible with .wtv.

[newfiend]

While I understand you wanting .wtv format (I've thought long and hard about it too); keep the original sources if you're going to go that route. WTV is proprietary, and who knows what media center software you'll be using down the line and if it will be compatible with .wtv.

This is why I keep mine in .MKV.. I can always convert to another container if need be..

[barnabas1969]

While I understand you wanting .wtv format (I've thought long and hard about it too); keep the original sources if you're going to go that route. WTV is proprietary, and who knows what media center software you'll be using down the line and if it will be compatible with .wtv.

This is why I keep mine in .MKV.. I can always convert to another container if need be..

Yes, and if I have an MPEG-4 or MPEG-2 video in a WTV container, I can always re-mux it into another container very easily too. There are plenty of tools to do this, and when not doing any re-encoding, it can be done very quickly. It can even be scripted to re-mux the files without any user intervention.

I'll try to get back to my search this weekend. My only issue is getting the subtitles muxed into the file. If I can solve that, I'll be 100% satisfied.