With the tools provided in MKVToolNix, one can get information about Matroska files (with mkvinfo), extract tracks and data from Matroska files (with mkvextract) and create Matroska files (with mkvmerge) from other media files. Matroska is an open source multimedia file format aiming to become the new container format for the future. With MKVToolNix, users can edit and create MKV files with ease.
In this tutorial, we will be covering the step by step instructions to install the MKVToolNix package on an Ubuntu Linux system. All steps will be performed on the command line only. Afterwards, we will go over a few example commands so you can start to understand how to use the tools and commands provided with MKVToolNix.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to install the MKVToolNix package on Ubuntu Linux
- How to use the commands included with MKVToolNix to edit and view info about MKV files
Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
---|---|
System | Ubuntu Linux |
Software | MKVToolNix |
Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
Conventions |
# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
Installation of MKVToolNix on Ubuntu Linux step by step instructions
Follow the step by step instructions below to get MKVToolNix installed on Ubuntu Linux, and then begin using the commands that come with the package to begin creating or editing Matroska (MKV) files.
- MKVToolNix is easy to install on Ubuntu Linux because it resides within the official software repositories for the system. Simply open a command line terminal and type the following commands to get MKVToolNix installed via the
apt
package manager:$ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install mkvtoolnix
Now that the software has been installed, we will have access to numerous Linux commands such as
mkvextract
,mkvinfo
,mkvmerge
, andmkvpropedit
. Let’s see how to use some of them.NOTE
If you do not already have some MKV files to experiment with, you can get some sample files by navigating to this website. This will allow you to test out some of the newly installed commands. - The
mkvinfo
can tell us information about the MKV file such as what tracks (video, audio, subtitles, chapters, etc) that it contains, as well as any metadata.
$ mkvinfo video.mkv
- The
mkvextract
command can be used to extract different “tracks” from the MKV file. For example, the video track, audio track, subtitles, chapters, etc. Let’s see how to extract the first audio track from a video file. We will name the extracted audio track asaudio.ogg
:$ mkvextract tracks video.mkv 1:audio.ogg
- We can use the
mkvpropedit
command to view property information for an MKV file as well as edit most of the property values without the need to perform a complete remux of the MKV file. For example, to see a list of properties and their values for an MKV file:$ mkvpropedit -l video.mkv
- The
mkvmerge
command is used to combine multiple tracks into a single Matroska MKV file. In other words, we can combine our video track and audio track into a single file. We can also include a subtitles file, chapters file, tags, and other supported track files. As an example, we will take a video track from an AVI file and combine it with subtitles that are in an SRT file. The result will be an MKV file with both tracks combined:$ mkvmerge -o video.mkv --subtitles 0:subs.srt old_video.avi
Closing Thoughts
In this tutorial, we saw how to install MKVToolNix Matroska tools on an Ubuntu Linux system. We also saw how to use the tools and commands that come with the application in order to extract data, edit property info, view metadata information, and merge multiple tracks into MKV files.