Making Compatible MKVs with MKVMerge

The following tip is from StephenB on the netgear forums. It helped me a lot. Thanks, Stephen.

Original Thread Title: Re: No sound on .MKV files , increasing in frequency.

It is the Muxing mode : Header stripping. This is also called "header compression". Though it doesn't save enough space to matter.

For some reason the Matroska developers made this mode the default earlier this summer. It doesn't work with most hardware players (including the EVA and also the WD Live).

You have to re-process the files to remove the header compression. This doesn't hurt the quality at all, and is a pretty fast operation. If you are comfortable running command line tools, you can either use mkWDclean.exe (found at https://sourceforge.net/projects/mat...7.zip/download) or MKVMerge (found at http://www.videohelp.com/tools/mkvtoolnix)

The command line strings are:

mkWDclean input.mkv output.mkv
mkvmerge -o output.mkv --compression -1:none input.mkv

There are two other ways that don't require opening a command line shell:

(a) You can use MKVMerge GUI, but it is tedious. You select every track (from the middle pane), select the "extra options" tab, and set user defined options to "--compression -1:none". (blank is not good enough).

(b) You can download VID2EVA from http://vid2eva.lefti.net. This is a freeware video conversion tool that I've put together. After installation you right click on the MKV and select "VID2EVA" then "transcode audio". For this particular file, it won't transcode since the audio is already AC3. But it will remove the header compression.