Support for (and ability to recode to) Matroska (.mkv)

[Qazerowl]

The Matroska Multimedia Container (.mkv file) is a freely licensed multimedia container that supports every video and audio format and supports other features like multiple subtitles, 3D video, and chapters/bookmarks. This makes it objectively better than MPEG-4 (.mp4 file) in every way, except widespread compatibility.

Adding support for the .mkv container would allow any form of encoding to support 3D video and multiple subtitles, support a more open standard, and easily allow for consistency among those who use Matroska for all other videos.

[jaimeMF]

I don't know what do you want exactly, could you explain how do you expect youtube-dl to work?

Note: you should be able to recode the video to mkv, just by using the --recode-video mkv option.

[Qazerowl]

Well, you are right, youtube-dl already has what I was looking for. To be fair, the --help only lists mp4,flv,ogg, and webm as arguments for --recode-video.

[jaimeMF]

You are right, I have updated it.

[nwgat]

i have a related question
do the reencode to mkv affect the video?
wouldn't remuxing be a better idea?

most flv streams are h264 with upto L4.1 and mkv supports that already since its made to contain anything

remuxing means that you DO not touch the video/audio, recoding means you will affect the quality of video/audio, so my question is, wouldnt it be useful to have a flv > mkv remux, you can do this with ffmpeg using ffmpeg -i input.flv -c copy -map 0 output.mkv as command

so i would like a --remux-mkv option that basicly just does this
takes the stream flv and passes it thru ffmpeg with the above options

[jaimeMF]

@nwgat Open a new issue for that.

[rzr]

@nwgat did you reported new issue about mkv support ? that one is related to mkv too :
#6185

Env var are welcome too

[chkuendig]

isn't this easily achievable with some simple argumens?
--recode-video=mkv --postprocessor-args "-c copy -map 0"