MKVmerge Batch Commands, Remove Tracks

To remove a particular track from an MKV file, the following notation should work:

mkvmerge -o output.mkv -atrack !2 input.mkv 

But I wasn't able to get the exclamation mart (meaning DON'T copy this track) to work. For some reason I kept getting "track not found" message. This should work with --vtrack or --strack (subtitle) or whatever.

Fortunately, I wanted to remove all the subtitles from my files, so I used the following instead:

mkvmerge -o output.mkv --no-subtitles input.mkv

If you only want to do this on one file, the mkvmergeGUI is fast and easy, but if you want to do it on a whole directory of files, you want to use this at the command line in a "For Loop," like so:

for i in *mkv; do mkvmerge -o ./newfiles/`basename "$i" mkv`.mkv --no-subtitles "$i" ; done

This will remove all subtitle tracks from all MKV files in the current folder, then put the new files in a previously-created sub-folder named "newfiles".

Removing Subtitles With MKVMerge

If you have subtitles in an MKV file that you want gone, you don't have to re-encode the whole thing. Simply open in MKVMerge, choose the track you want to remove (the text track if you want to remove subtitles), uncheck it, and remux. It'll take a few seconds and won't re-encode everything else. While there, you may want to make sure Compression is set to "none" explicitly on the extra options tab for each track to ensure maximum compatibility with things such as PS3, etc.